


the fate you've carved on me

by orphan_account



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, F/M, Fate, M/M, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-11 12:20:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the first day of freshman year at uni, Niall nearly gets hit by a bus.</p><p>It’s pretty typical, really. He tends to start things out at shittily as possible and then get better from there. His mum says it’s the key to his optimism—he always starts at the very bottom so that he knows he’s on his way up.</p><p>(Superhero!AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

On the first day of freshman year at uni, Niall nearly gets hit by a bus.

It’s pretty typical, really. He tends to start things out at shittily as possible and then get better from there. His mum says it’s the key to his optimism—he always starts at the very bottom so that he knows he’s on his way up.

He gets to his first class on time, a dull class on the history of photography that he hopes beyond hope will get better as they actually, y’know, get to the part where they use anything close to a modern camera. But by the time it’s over he’s starving, and he talks Josh into getting food with him even though he doesn’t really have the time before he has to get to his actual photography class.

The good thing about going away to uni with your best mate is that he knows what sandwich to order you at a sandwich shop on the first day of class, even if it’s not exactly the sandwich you would get at home because they don’t have pickles and the cheese isn’t sharp enough.

The bad thing about going away to uni with your best mate is that he’s no better judge of how to get to the photo building with time to spare before class than you are. Probably worse. Josh is a worse judge of most things.

It’s dumb, but he’s not used to being in the city yet, and back home if he darted out into traffic he’d get cursed at but everyone would be used to dogs and cats and sheep and kids all doing the same thing, so they would be _watching_ , and they’d slow down and no one would get hurt.

The bus doesn’t slow down. Not in time, anyway. He hears the screech of brakes in his ear and he has just enough time to turn to see it bearing down on him, and then the air gets knocked out of him by something solid and warm and there’s a bar of pressure at the back of his knees and he’s being lifted, and this isn’t at all how he imagined being hit by a bus would feel. Not that he’s often imagined being hit by a bus, but he expected it to _hurt_. He feels his camera strap snap, there’s a confusing crash of glass and metal, and then he’s up and over the curb and onto the sidewalk and nothing hurts and the bar under his legs isn’t a bar at all but an arm, and there’s another around his back, crushing him in tight. He’s got his face pressed into someone’s chest; he can feel a heart hammering against his nose where it’s squashed flat against what feels like a t-shirt.

There’s a moment where neither he nor the person holding him moves, and then he tries to lift his head and the arm around his back loosens immediately. “Sorry,” says a light tenor that he feels against his cheek more than hears, and then he pulls back far enough to see his rescuer.

Perhaps it’s the shock, but he can’t do much more than stare, taking in the boy who’s saved him. The boy’s staring back, looking as terrified and confused as Niall feels, his dark eyes huge and wide above cheekbones that could cut glass. He looks like someone Josh’s little sister would hang posters of on her bedroom wall, a model or a rock star or something, and Niall feels hysterical laughter bubbling up in his chest. _Hey Mum_ he imagines saying to his mother when he calls her tonight, _Today I was saved from being hit by a bus by a famous rock star._

He slumps forward, boneless with relief, and laughs into the stranger’s neck.

The stranger, to his credit, just holds him, probably thinking he’s saved some sort of lunatic and it’s better to let him laugh himself out. When Niall’s giggles subside he wipes his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, pulling back again.

The stranger shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says, his voice soft. It’s a nice voice, the kind of voice Niall might expect from someone with a penchant for saving people from buses. “Um. You’re okay?”

Niall nods and tries to put his feet down so this boy isn’t, like, carrying him bridal style through the streets. He slides down the stranger’s side but his feet don’t hit the pavement, and when he looks down his eyes go wide. Neither himself or the stranger are touching the ground. They’re hovering, in fact, about three inches above the smashed remains of Niall’s camera.

“My camera,” he says numbly, and then, “oh my god you’re _flying_.”

“Shit,” says the boy, the concern in his face turning to panic, and then he does something with the hand that’s not still slung around Niall’s shoulders, and the two of them drift sideways and drop and Niall’s feet hit the ground, the shock of it twinging his knees. 

“Oh my god,” says Niall again. “You’re a superhero.”

The boy shrugs fluidly, dropping his arm off Niall’s shoulder. He runs a hand through his hair, which is teased upwards in a way that makes him look ethereal and impossible, which, like, he is pretty fucking impossible because he can _fly_. “Sorry about your camera, mate,” he says, a little bit awkwardly.

“It’s, uh, it’s okay?” says Niall, because there are definitely more important concerns. There’s a crowd gathering around them now, chattering and shouting and amazed. None of them seem to have noticed the whole superhero thing and Niall’s trying very hard to figure out how to ask about it without giving anything away because if superheroes are real then the rules about superheroes are real and the _cardinal rule_ of superheroes is that you don’t give away their identity.

“Um,” he says, but the stranger’s already moving past him, squeezing his shoulder as he goes.

“Glad you’re okay,” he says shortly, voice thick with something Niall doesn’t understand even a little bit, and then he’s shouldering his way through the crowds and away.

“ _Hey_ —“ Niall calls, because he hasn’t even fucking thanked him and he’s a superhero and you can’t just, like, meet a superhero and then move on to go to photo class and forget about it, but then Josh is there and he’s gathering Niall up in his arms and he babbling _holy shit holy shit I thought you were going to die_ and Niall hugs him back because maybe you can forget long enough to reassure your best mate that you’ve gone away to uni with that you’re alright.

He goes to class camera-less and in shock. Thankfully it’s the first meeting so they really only hand out the syllabus and talk about what kinds of things they’re interested in doing in terms of photography—Niall hasn’t really thought about it enough, or at all, and his mind is caught in that impossible moment of weightlessness, the feeling that his feet should be on the ground but weren’t. It was like something was pushing up under him that he could both feel and not feel, and it makes him itch and sweat to think about. “I want to, like, capture the moments that no one thinks about,” he says when it comes time for him to talk. “Like, smiles and stuff that you do without thinking.” The clasp of a hand on a shoulder, the nervous slide of fingers through hair. “Just. People being happy.”

The professor just nods and moves on to the next girl, who talks about maybe wanting to do wedding photography, and Niall feels pretentious and weird and kind of unreal, like he’s squashed into a box that until yesterday he thought was the whole world.

He keeps looking at everyone around him out of the corners of his eyes, wondering. They just look like uni kids, but now that he knows there’s a boy, somewhere in the city, who can really, actually fly…

It makes sense, on a weird kind of level. He’s not religious and if someone had asked him if he believed in magic he would’ve laugh at them, but he’s always kind of known, or hoped, or believed in—something, a kind of energy to people, a presence that’s more than physical. It’s hard to live in small-town Ireland without halfway believing in ghosts, and he supposes the jump from ghosts to superheroes isn’t such an impossible one.

It is one that’s going to take some getting used to, though, and by the end of class he’s kind of convinced himself it didn’t happen, that he’d had some kind of mental break in response to the trauma of nearly dying. It doesn’t actually make sense because he can still _feel_ the weirdness of it, and his camera is definitely smashed to bits, and he didn’t save himself from a bus, but. This way he can, like, think about anything that isn’t the feeling of flying or mysterious strangers.

He calls his mum after class, walking slowly, and stands and waits at a crosswalk. “Hey, honey,” she says, and he feels wrapped in the normalcy of it like a blanket. He’s suddenly and hideously homesick and overwhelmed and he bites at the inside of his cheek.

“I broke my camera, mum,” he says, and it’s really not the most important part but it’s hard to put the most important part into words. 

“What?” she asks. “How? What?”

“Well,” he says, “I, uh. Nearly got hit by a bus.”

“ _Niall,_ ” she wails, “baby, I knew the city was too dangerous—“

“Mum, calm down,” he says, laughing. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

“You’re a stupid boy and you should know better and I love you so much,” she babbles. “I told Josh to take care of you, and you have to take care of him, you’re in this together, hear me—“

“Yes mum,” Niall says, “I know, Josh was there, he made sure I was alright, it’s _okay_.” Disasters always seem like so much less of a big deal once one’s mum starts making them into one. “I promise I’m fine, but. My camera.”

“Fuck your camera,” says his mum vehemently.

Niall squints at his feet, concentrates on the solidness of the sidewalk below him. “I’ll get a job,” he says. “To save up money for another.”

He hears her sigh. “You’re a good boy. My best boy.”

“Yes, mum,” he says, embarrassed. 

“How are your classes going?” she asks. “Have you made any friends?”

“It’s the first day,” he protests. “Classes are fine, probably good, I can’t really tell, yet? And.” He stares across the street, watches everyone pass him by, not ready quite yet, to move. “There’s one boy, maybe? He um. Helped me, with the bus thing.”

“Makes him worth your friendship in my book,” his mum says. “What’s he like?”

Niall furrows his brow, thinking about what he could possibly say. _Well, he can fly,_ is right out, so he goes with, “He looks a bit like a rock star, he’s got, like, that mysterious thing going on?” which is true in absolute _spades_. “Dunno if I should pursue that friendship, though, no girl’d look at me twice next to him.”

“Speaking of girls,” says his mum, and he laughs, feeling tension that he hadn’t even noticed ease away. It’s like he’s passed some kind of test.

“First _day_ , mum,” he reminds her, and crosses the street.

He ends up borrowing a camera from the photo department, which is kind of awful, because he can only check it out between 8 AM and 8 PM and he has to sign it in and out each time, but at least he can take pictures. He mostly ends up taking pictures of Josh, who always laughs and scrunches up his face. “We’re in a new city, mate,” he says. “Don’t you want to take pictures of new things?”

“Why would I? Brought my favorite subject with me,” Niall replies easily, because Josh is full of the exact kind of joy he meant in that first photo class—something careless and a little bit stupid that Niall feels like he used to be able to tap into much more easily, before.

Before the city and before the bus and before superheroes being real.

He does try to find a job. He applies at the uni library, although he’s pretty sure he would hate working inside and alone all the time, and he applies at the book store and to work at the front desk at the gym and offers his services as a dog walker and pretty much anything he can think of.

Josh and him spend a lot of time in the music rooms after school, just fucking around, Josh on drums and himself on guitar, and there’s a girl called Jade in his photo history class who smiles at him when she sees him and he notices her sheet music and invites her to hang sometime and she seems like she actually might, so. Life goes on, and, as always, goes up, but somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s snapped into it at all, like it’s sort of happening around him without his intervention. 

He’s in the coffee shop just off campus, filling out a job application to work there, when the superhero rockstar walks by the window, hand in hand with a pretty pink-haired girl. He’s laughing down at her, dark eyes scrunched up with amusement, and she’s got a nose ring and a really lovely smile, and Niall feels a little bit like all the air’s been sucked out of the world.

He’s on his feet before he really thinks about it, the bell at the door of the coffee shop jingling behind him as he pushes his way outside. “Hey—“ he calls, but they don’t hear him, so he darts forward and grabs at the boy’s free hand.

He spins, surprise stealing the laughter from his face. Niall has a flash of guilt at that, but it’s replaced with an expression he has no idea what to do with, a mixture of joy and terror and worry and weird fondness, and for a minute he thinks the boy must be looking at someone else, but then he goes, “Oh. Hi,” and he’s definitely talking to Niall.

“Hi,” says Niall. “Um. Hi.”

The boy doesn’t say anything else, just looks at him dark-eyed and curious and complicated, which is kind of fair, considering that Niall didn’t, like, ask him anything, but just running up to someone and going _what are you why are you how did you become what you are_ is rude and also, he doesn’t know if the boy’s girlfriend even knows—knows anything.

She, for her part, bursts out laughing and sticks out a hand. “Hello,” she says. “This is Zayn. I’m Perrie. And I’m thinking you guys should talk somewhere a little more private.” She winks at Niall, and he blinks back. That answers that, then.

Zayn swallows, casting Perrie a glance, and Niall realizes he’s still kind of holding onto his hand and drops it, embarrassed. “That, I’d like that?” he hazards, because there’s a lot going on that he _really_ doesn’t understand.

Perrie cocks her head at Zayn. “Well?” she prompts.

Zayn drops her hand, running his hand over his face. “Um,” he says, “What, um, what dorm do you live in?”

“Heshels,” says Niall dumbly, because what the hell does that have to do with anything—

“You can get to the roof of that, right?” Zayn says seriously. “Meet me up there in fifteen?”

Niall thinks about how long it’ll take him to get back to his dorm. “Um, twenty?”

Zayn smiles at him, a warmth in it that Niall feels somehow he hasn’t deserved. “Twenty,” he says.

Niall nods, and turns to jog back to his dorm. He tries desperately to think of things he can ask— _how did you get your powers, what else can you do, are you an alien or magic or was there an accident or_ —but literally all of them are feel so incredibly invasive, like, what right does he have to ask? What right does he have to do anything but be grateful?

But he itches with it, with the need to know something, anything, about this world he’s stumbled on. He needs to know about it more than anything he’s ever needed in his life.

Zayn’s waiting for him when he gets to the roof. Niall falters to a stop just beyond the threshold, and just stares, really taking in, for the first time, the first superhero he’s ever seen. He’s a dark, soulful boy in a leather jacket and a white tee shirt and black jeans, but it’s like someone has taken all the possibilities for a boy of that description and layered them over one another, a thousand-exposure photograph, all the best features of each picked out until they become something that transcends the originals. He’s hovering about four feet above the surface of the roof, hands spread to either side of him like he’s a gymnast on invisible parallel bars. Silhouetted against the late afternoon sun, he’s the most purely _beautiful_ person that Niall’s ever seen.

It’s a thought that kind of surprises him, but it’s a small surprise in a sea of world-shaking ones.

Zayn twitches his long fingers, and slowly descends to the roof, touching down like a dancer. There’s no way anyone should be that light-footed in combat boots. Niall’s mouth is dry.

Zayn’s smiling at him again. “So there’s that,” he says, and chuckles, like he’s sharing a joke with Niall, and maybe he kind of is.

Niall swallows hard. “Christ,” he says, “I’d sort of convinced myself I’d made you up.”

Zayn stares at him, his mouth half-open, and Niall feels like he’s been shown into the lobby of a theatre, like he finally knows the names on the marquee, but the doors are still locked and everyone inside is laughing. He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot, and then Zayn seems to shake himself out of whatever thought he’d been stuck on and says, “Yeah, um, that’s kind of why I showed you? So you’d know you’re not, like, crazy or whatever.”

“Thanks,” says Niall. “I needed that.”

Zayn takes a step towards him and then seems to think better of it. “You’re alright, yeah? You weren’t hurt.”

Niall shakes his head. “I just—you were kind of a revelation, you know, and I didn’t want to just. Let you walk by. I’m sorry, that’s weird, I’m treating you like you’re some sign or something and you’re probably—“ he almost says _just a guy_ but it’s so, so clear that Zayn’s not, and anyway he has no idea if—“Are you—you’re human?”

Zayn’s eyes warm, though, not offended at all. “I’m human,” he says. “Perrie too.”

“Is she your girlfriend?” Niall asks, because it feels like the least invasive question he can access at the moment.

Zayn tilts his head to one side. “Partner, in. What we do.”

“You’re a superhero team?” Niall asks, incredulous.

Zayn wrinkles his nose. “More a duo than a team,” he says. “I, um. There used to be more of us.”

“What happened?” Niall asks, and as soon as he’s said it he knows it was the wrong thing to say. 

He always hears people talk about walls going up behind eyes and he’s always kind of thought it was bullshit—there are things you can always tell in expressions, in his freshman-photo-student opinion. But it’s like flicking a switch. Zayn goes from at ease and comfortable and open to something much more jittery and nervous. He even rounds his shoulders like he’s trying to hide in himself. He clears his throat and slides a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “They left,” he says shortly.

“Oh,” says Niall. “I’m sorry.”

Zayn slips a cigarette out of the pack and puts it to his lips. For a crazy second Niall thinks he’s just going to snap his fingers or something it’ll light, like he’s stored up the light of the sun within himself and he can summon it at will—but his hand’s in his pocket again and comes out with an ordinary lighter, and Niall feels like an idiot. 

He scuffs a toe against the ground. “You saved my life, man,” he says.

Zayn shrugs, smiling sideways at him, but it’s a little hollow. “Comes with the job,” he says, not harsh, just humble.

Niall nods to himself. “Cool,” he says. “How did you—I mean—“ He’s not sure what he’s even asking, why he’s still here. Zayn’s showed him what he’s going to show him and he feels suddenly like an intruder, like he’s butting in on this hero and his sky.

Zayn takes a drag on his cigarette. “It’s, um, kind of a long story,” he says, and that could be an answer to anything, really. It’s the most earnest, politest brush-off Niall’s ever gotten, but it’s a brush-off nonetheless, and, like, of course it is. He’s probably coming down from saving the world or some shit, and he doesn’t want to be spending all his downtime chatting with a star-struck frosh.

“Yeah,” he says, “Alright. Well.” He shoves a hand into his hair. _Thank you_ has never felt so inadequate in his life, but he says it anyway. “Really, mate, thanks. I mean. Obviously.”

Zayn just watches him, smoke curling around his face, and Niall itches to take his picture. His fingers twitch at his sides. “I, um, I’ll see you around then,” he says.

Zayn nods, still watching him, and Niall slips back through the access door and down the stairs.

He’s not really sure what to do with himself. He feels…he feels like he’s felt since Zayn rescued him, and it’s just taken this long to put a name to it: he feels _useless_. Not just because he doesn’t have his camera but on some deeper, like, existential level. Maybe it’s the city. Maybe it comes with a near-death experience, the aftermath, the feeling that if he’s here he should be doing something good with his life, something _worthwhile_.

Maybe it’s the quiet boy on the roof behind him, who’s so used to doing real good he dismisses saving a life as an everyday occurrence.

He goes back to his room and sits on his bed. He picks up his guitar but doesn’t play it, sliding his fingers over the strings, feeling them sing with tension.

Josh comes in about half an hour later, his backpack slung over his shoulder, all cheerful energy. “Hey, mate,” he says, and drops his bag on his bed. He stills when Niall doesn’t say anything. “You okay?”

Niall nods, smiling at him reassuringly. “Yeah, fine, grand.” He fiddles with the tuning pegs. “Hey, uh, you know when I nearly got hit by that bus?”

Josh’s eyebrows shoot up and he sits on his bed opposite Niall. “I can’t exactly forget it,” he says. “Thought you were _dead_ , mate.”

“Yeah,” says Niall. “Me too. Did you see what happened?”

Josh shook his head. “Not really. That guy must’ve pushed you out of the way, because when the bus moved on he was helping you up, yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Niall. “I dunno, it.” He wants to say _he wasn’t helping me up, he was setting me down_. He wants to say, _I met a real superhero today and I don’t know anything more than I did before but I feel like I shouldn’t, really_. He wants to say, _have you ever met anyone that’s made you feel huge and tiny at the same time?_ But Josh hadn’t seen, and it didn’t feel right just blabbing it outright, even to his best mate. He might not be able to do much, but at least he can keep a secret. “It was weird, is all.”

“I’d think you’d be happier about it,” Josh says, quirking his eyebrows at Niall. “Considering you’re not dead.”

“I am happy about it,” Niall says, laughing a little. “Obviously I’m happy to be alive.” 

Josh looks at him a moment longer. “Y’wanna smoke?” he asks. “You look like you need to chill.”

Niall shakes his head, because the last thing he wants to do is go back to the careless repetition of his life, to getting high and playing music and going to class. He doesn’t want to bury this feeling until he figures it out. “No, I, um.” He puts his guitar back in its case. “I’m gonna go for a run, or something?”

Josh gapes at him. “A run. You. _Running_.”

Niall shrugs. “I dunno, man, I have all this energy.” He stands up. “Maybe I’ll get some food.”

“Maybe you should get laid,” Josh calls after him, and Niall chuckles at him.

He doesn’t end up running but he does end up walking, farther from campus than he’s ventured before. It’s late afternoon, the sun slanting between the buildings, and part of him wants to board a bus and just go home and part of him knows that whatever this is would be worse there, it’d be a literal step backwards in this process he didn’t even realize he’d started on until an hour ago.

He tries to focus on the newness of the city, the sheer number of opportunities and possibilities it contains, tries to think about all the things he could do that could be important, but it just ends up feeling overwhelming. He doesn’t know how to do anything. He knows how to play guitar. He knows how to take photographs that some people like. He knows how to make his friends laugh. He has no idea how to save the world.

He follows the streets that look the most open, wanting to see the sky, and ends up down by the river. The sun is starting to set, and he buys himself a hotdog from a street cart and hops up on the railing of a bridge to watch it go down. It’s a moment he wants to photograph but couldn’t even with a camera: it’s the stillness he wants to capture, the slow slide of the sun behind the clouds, the dogs barking in the distance. The feeling of a city winding down.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says a soft voice from his side, and he yelps and nearly falls into the river. A small, strong hand steadies him, and he looks over to see the Zayn’s pink-haired partner, Perrie, leaning on the rail beside him.

“Hi,” he says.

She smiles at him. “Hi.”

“If you know what I’m thinking I wish you’d tell me,” Niall says, playing it off for laughs, but she’s a superhero, maybe she means she can read his mind. He wants to laugh at the thought, but it might actually be true.

She laughs, which freaks him out even further, until she shakes her head and says, “I can’t read your mind.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Then how did you know that I was thinking maybe you could?”

She cocks her head. “You have a very expressive face,” she says, and then, slower, “and I’ve been where you are now.” She turns to look at the river. “It’s weird, right? It’s like you forget how to have fun.”

Niall thinks about how he hadn’t even considered getting high, how things like football and video games and even music seem like weird distractions from what really matters, whatever that is, and nods. 

“It’s like…” She gestures, taking in the bridge they’re sitting on, the city around them, the sun and sky. “All this is funneled into you all at once, everything is right there and you have to do something with it, you have to make it better because what the hell else are you _for_ , right?”

“Yeah,” says Niall, “yeah, exactly.”

She nods. “I know.” She pulls her hair over her shoulder, and Niall sees the metal glint of piercings at her ears and the nape of her neck. “When I was eight,” she says, “I fell off an overpass into traffic.”

“Oh my god,” says Niall, his eyes going huge. “What?”

She smiles sideways at him, just a quick flash and then gone. “I was fine,” she says. “Not a scratch on me. The driver swerved to avoid me and crashed into the sidewall. I was hit by falling glass,” she continues, her eyes on the water below them, “and when the car caught fire my clothes burned right off me, but I was fine.” 

Niall swallows, turning on the railing to stare at her.

“The driver lost both of his legs,” she says softly. “His wife, in the passenger seat, died.” She shakes her head. “I was too young to understand any of it, you know? I didn’t even understand what had happened to me, not even touching on what happened to _them_ , but. As I grew up it, like, filtered in, and I’ve been living with that feeling my whole life.”

“How do you deal with it?” Niall asks, quietly. “God, I can’t even imagine.”

Perrie turns to face him, the light catching her pink hair. She looks ethereal and beautiful and very, very alien, a piece of the sunset made human, and paradoxically it grounds Niall, somehow, anchors him to the strangeness. She and Zayn are of a piece, somehow, sun and sunset. “Two things,” she says. “First, you just do what you can. I can give you the number for a soup kitchen I used to work at, to start with, and you work your way up from there.”

“Up to what, though?” Niall asks. “I’m just, like, a person, I’m not indestructible and I can’t fly and I can’t.” He stares at his feet. “I can’t save the world, and that’s the problem.”

Perrie snorts, and he looks up at her, surprised. She raises her eyebrows. “I can’t save the world, either. You think Zayn and I fight off aliens and giant crocodiles all the time? Cosmic threats?”

“Well,” says Niall, and feels his cheeks heat. “Yes?”

She smirks at him. “Adorable,” she says, “but no. The biggest thing we do is stop normal people from doing things they regret. Hurting other people, hurting themselves.” She gives him a significant look, and he realizes why she’s here, why she’s telling him all of this, realizes his precarious position on the bridge’s railing.

“I, I wasn’t—I wouldn’t have _jumped_ ,“ he stammers. “I’m just here to think.”

“Good,” she says. “That’s the second thing I was going to say. Remember that you’re part of the world, yeah?”

Niall blinks at her. “What?”

She grins at him. “You want to make the world better, yeah? So make _you_ better. Make you happy.”

Niall grins back at her, slow. “Yeah,” he says, “Okay.” He gnaws at his lip. “Um, does Zayn—“ he stumbles to a stop, not sure why he asking, or even what he’s asking, really.

Perrie raises an eyebrow at him, but waits.

“Does he feel it, too?” he asks, finally finding words that are at least nearby to what he wants to say. “The purposelessness?”

Perrie bites her lip and regards him for a long moment, and then finally shakes her head. “Zayn’s known his purpose for a long, long time.”

“Lucky,” says Niall, wrinkling his nose.

“Sometimes I think so,” Perrie agrees, the _sometimes I don’t_ hanging between them for long enough that it makes Niall itch to ask why, and then she says, “Anyway, I should go. Aliens to fight and all.”

“Yeah,” says Niall, and hops down from the railing. He smiles at Perrie and starts back towards campus, but something makes him stop. He turns, and calls after her, only a little hesitant. “Um,” he says, “Can I see you again?”

She stops and turns back to look at him, looking small and frail and everything he knows she isn’t in the gathering dark. “Is that a ‘will I ever see you again’,” she asks slowly, “or a ‘can I _see you_ again’?”

“Either,” says Niall easily, because he really doesn’t care. She’s pretty and she’s kind and she’s his link to a world he’d never even imagined. For fuck’s sake, she’s a _superhero_. “Whichever you wanna answer.”

She pushes her hand into her hair like she’s thinking. “This is not the last time you’ll see me,” she says, and then smiles. He smiles back, not as disappointed as he thought he might be, just glad she didn’t vanish like, like Batman. Not that she’s much like Batman at all. Zayn would probably be Batman, brooding on roofs.

Not that he knows enough about Zayn to know that. Not that he knows anything at all about Zayn, except that he’s humble and he can fly and he has _purpose_.

“I’m glad,” he says, “Bye, Perrie.”

“Bye, Niall,” she says, and it’s not until he’s back at the dorm that he realizes he never told her or even Zayn his name. 

“Maybe she _can_ read minds,” he says aloud.

Josh pulls off his headphones. “What, mate?”

**

Perrie pushes the access door open, sighing when she sees Zayn still perched at the edge of the roof. He’s crouching, now, like a stupid coiffed gargoyle, cigarette butts scattered around his feet.

“Litterer,” Perrie says fondly, and Zayn turns enough that he can see her out of the corner of his eye.

“I’ll clean them up before I go,” he says absently, and stands, his gaze still on the street below.

She joins him on the edge. “He’s fine,” she says. “He was just thinking.”

He nods and looks at her at last. He looks terrible, gaunt and worried-eyed and just _tired_ , and Perrie cups his cheek, smoothing her thumb over the bag under his eye. “God, Zayn,” she says. “When was the last time you slept?”

He shrugs one shoulder, the corner of his mouth turning up. “Last Thursday?” he asks, and she scowls fiercely at him and slaps his cheek gently, once. He takes her hand, slipping their fingers together, staring down at their hands.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I need to sleep, but it’s so.” He shakes his head. “It’s so lonely, Per. It’s the loneliest I’ve ever been, worse than when Lou left.”

She sighs, sliding into his side and putting her head on his shoulder.

“You should’ve gone to talk to him,” she says after a long moment, both of them staring out at the darkening sky.

“No,” he says firmly, “I shouldn’t have.”

She lets her eyes slip closed. “You shouldn’t have,” she admits. “But you should soon.”

She can feel him shake his head, but she’s too tired to fight him on it and keeps her eyes closed as he lifts them both into the sky.


	2. Chapter 2

Zayn sighs and pushes a hand through his hair. He should be asleep. It’s 3 AM, he should really, really be asleep, but he can’t. He can’t just close his eyes and slip into _nothing_ , just a blank space until he opens them again. The loneliness of it makes him shiver. He wouldn’t even be sleeping alone, technically, because Perrie’s curled up in his bed. But.

He dreamed of flying for the first time when he was eight years old. In the dream, he was older—he’s never been sure how old, anything at all is “older” to an eight-year-old—and standing on top of a building, a building in a city. It was dawn, and the sun was rising, and from behind him someone said, in a male, cheerful voice, a hint of an Irish brogue clinging to it with the last scraps of the speaker’s sleep, “Good morning.”

He stepped off the edge, turning in midair to look at the speaker, and woke up.

Naturally, he immediately tried to recreate the scene by jumping off the roof of his mother’s garden shed. He fell. For three quarters of the way to the ground he fell, and then he flung his hands at the ground rushing up to meet him and the rushing slowed, and for two feet he drifted, coming to rest face-first and exhilarated in the dirt. He learned to control it—slowly. He tried too much, at first, did nothing but climb up to the roof and jump down again, over and over, until his palms itched with invisible pressure and his head was pounding, and then he’d fall into bed and dream again of the building and the voice but he’d never manage to turn far enough around to see the speaker’s face.

By his ninth birthday he could step off the roof of the shed and just hang, triumphant, in the air.

The first thing he did was show his best friend Danny, and the first thing his best friend Danny did was tell his little brother Ant, and the first thing they all did was swear on their blood and bones and mother’s grave that they’d never tell another living soul. They sliced open their palms and pressed them, solemn, together, and that night Zayn dreamed a different dream.

In this, he was on the ground, inside, somewhere that smelled of coffee and the cigarettes his mom hid from him in her favorite jacket, and he was watching an older boy, almost an adult, singing softly into a microphone. He was blond and sitting on a stool, a guitar in his lap. His eyes were closed, lashes sweeping freckled cheeks.

Every night he dreamed, often of flying, always of that same boy, the boy who said good morning, who sang soft and sweet to a room that smelled like home. He was eleven before he saw his eyes, and he woke from that dream feeling like he’d been given something amazing, something important.

He didn’t tell Danny and Ant about the dreams, only about the superpowers. He talked about them only to his baby sister, who just stared up at him, full of trust.

When he was twelve he had his first kissing dream, all sensation of lips on lips, his hands buried in blond hair.

When he was thirteen he came home from school to find his mother talking to a man in the kitchen, a man who introduced himself as simply Simon, and told a very confused Zayn that he wanted to speak to him in private.

Zayn exchanged looks with his mother. “Sure,” he said slowly, and she nodded at him. He took Simon outside to the chairs in the garden, where she could see them out the window but not hear what they were talking about.

“I’m going to need you to take me seriously,” said Simon, “and I’m going to need you to tell me the truth.” He was serious in a way that adults rarely were around Zayn, no hint of condescension.

Zayn swallowed. “Okay,” he said.

“What do you dream about?”

Zayn blinked, his mind going blank. “W-What?”

Simon folded his hands, leaning across the small table between them. “What do you dream about, Zayn?”

Zayn licked his lips, but there was something about Simon that demands truth, and the dreams by themselves, just telling him about the dreams, that wasn't breaking his blood-oath or incriminating him or anything. “Flying,” he said at last. “I dream about flying.”

Simon nodded, as if he’d expected that. “Is that all?”

Zayn closed his eyes. “No,” he said, but didn’t go on, and when he opened his eyes Simon was just watching him, silent.

Zayn stared him down with all his thirteen-year-old bravery, and then Simon nodded again. “It’s none of my business,” he said with surprising candor. “Your flying dreams, then. Have you done anything about them?”

“What, um, what do you mean?” asked Zayn, squinting like he’s confused and hoping he doesn’t look panicked instead.

“Have you done anything,” Simon said again. “Have you flown?”

Zayn stared at his knees for a long time, and then he said, very quietly, “Yes.”

Simon examined him for a long, long moment. “Alright,” he said at last, and stood up. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” said Zayn, baffled as to why that had anything to do with anything.

Simon slipped a business card out of his pocket. “You don’t owe me anything, Zayn,” he said, which at the time Zayn didn’t understand at all. “You don’t owe anything to anyone, but you have the potential to do a lot of good.”

Zayn gulped. “You mean like, like a superhero?”

The corner of Simon’s mouth turned up, just the slightest bit. “Kind of,” he said, and handed the business card to Zayn. “If you have questions.”

Zayn had thousands, but he didn’t ask any of them, just taking the card and nodding. Simon went back inside, said something to Zayn’s mother, and she smiled at him, and then he was out the door and gone.

“Did he tell you what kind of award they wanted to give you for your grades?” she asked him, and he blinked at her for a minute and then said, “No, I’m supposed to call.”

That night he dreamed of sleeping in someone’s arms, his face against a flat, muscled chest, dreams of half-awake kisses and guitar-calloused hands slipping down under sheets and he wakes up hard and embarrassed and very, very thirteen.

Now he stares at his own reflection in the window of his flat and feels very, very nineteen, too old and too young all at once. 

“My god, it’s worse than we thought!” says a mocking, familiar voice, and Zayn spins.

Louis and Harry are sitting on his couch, hand in hand. Louis is tan and smiling a little, like it hasn’t been eight months since they’ve seen each other, a year since they’ve seen each other _properly_. Harry, for his part, is much less restrained in his excitement, grinning from ear to ear like the huge puppy he is. His hair is longer than Zayn remembers, and he’s _tall_ , tall enough Zayn can tell he’s got nearly half a foot on Louis and they’re sitting down. They look comfortable and composed, like they’ve been there for hours, except there’s rainwater in Louis’ hair and dirt on Harry’s knees.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Zayn says, heart pounding as he drinks them in. “A little warning might be nice!”

“Sorry,” says Louis, not sorry even a little bit, and Harry just keeps beaming at Zayn, dazzling and dimpled.

They all just kind of stare at one another for another moment and then Louis is on his feet, crushing Zayn in tight, and Harry with his ridiculous long arms is holding them both, and Zayn feels like he can breathe again for the first time in a month.

“Missed you,” he mutters into possibly-Louis’-possibly-Harry’s hair, and the arms around him tighten.

Louis pulls back and kisses him matter-of-factly on the lips. Harry laughs, and they both collapse backwards onto the couch again, Harry ending up lying down, his head in Louis’ lap.

“We missed you too,” Harry says sincerely.

“For no very good reason, I might add,” Louis says archly. “You can _fly_ , mate, and you still can’t find the time to drop by for a visit?”

“Says the teleporting boy,” Zayn retorts. “It takes two hours to fly from here to Paris by _plane_ , and you know I can’t sustain that speed for that long. Besides, there’s nothing to push off in the sea.”

“Excuses excuses,” Louis says, shaking his head. “Do you know how many jumps it took us? We could’ve ended up drowned on our way here!”

Zayn smiles at him. “But you came anyway.”

“Yes, we came anyway,” says Louis. “And it was terribly unpleasant.”

Harry makes a face and picks a leaf out of his hair.

“I’m sorry,” says Zayn. “I’m, I’m really glad you did.” It’s small and inadequate for what he means, but Louis knows. Louis always knows. “You have to know how happy I am to see you, but. Why are you here?”

“Perrie called us,” Harry says quietly, his facing turning soft and concerned. Louis purses his lips, running his hands absently through Harry’s hair.

Zayn coughs and pulls a chair over so he can sit facing them. “Why?”

“For fuck’s sake, Zayn,” Louis snaps. “You _know_ why. You’re being fucking moronic.” He crosses his arms. “You saved him what, a month ago? Perrie says since then you’ve talked to him a total of once, and ended that conversation with a ‘see you around’. You know that’s not how it fucking works, you counseled _me_ through this shit.”

“Speaking from the other side of things,” Harry says, “You should definitely have told him by now.”

“It’s different than you guys,” Zayn says, swallowing. “I can’t—I don’t know how to—I wasn’t prepared, and I made an idiot of myself, and I think he thinks I hate him, and he’s straight and I can’t be his, like, superhero pal, that’s not—“ He shakes his head, frustrated.

“Hold on, slow down,” Louis says. “You do know you have the worst gaydar in history. You thought Liam was straight for years.”

“Liam _was_ straight for years,” Zayn says, “and it’s not about my gaydar. He saw me and Perrie together and he asked if she was my girlfriend and when I said no he asked her out.”

“Oh dear,” says Louis. “I assume she was nice when she turned him down.”

Zayn shrugs. “She’s always nice. But you see the problem, right? Like. That was an opening to ask _me_ if he were going to ask me, and he didn’t.”

“Wait,” says Harry. “You said he saw you and Perrie together?”

Zayn nods, and Harry turns to raise his eyebrows at Louis, who nods, catching on. “Well there’s your problem,” he says. “He thinks _you’re_ straight, as would anyone with eyes that saw you guys interact.”

Zayn blinks at them. “I’m not sleeping with Perrie,” he says. “Not anymore, and we were never like that, anyway.”

“Never said you were, babe,” Louis says easily. “But you love her, yeah?”

“Obviously,” says Zayn. “She’s _Perrie_.”

“It shows,” Harry says. “Like, a lot.”

Zayn thinks about Niall stopping them on the street, thinks about how he’d finally been feeling okay and right and he’d been holding hands with Perrie and laughing and Niall had grabbed his other hand, and for a split second, fingers threaded through fingers, he’d been precisely and exactly where he always knew he’d end up.

“Fine,” says Zayn. “Fine, so he thinks I’m straight. But there’s this girl in his class, and. I know what it looks like when people are attracted to me, and he’s not, he just looks at me like, like I’m from mars, or something.”

“For all he knows you are from mars,” Louis points out. “Which is why you have to _tell him._ ”

“Plus,” says Harry, “I used to date girls before I met Louis.”

“Don’t remind me,” Louis mutters, and tightens his hands in Harry’s hair. Harry grins up at him, lip trapped between his teeth, and for the first time in years Zayn’s jealous of them, achingly so, of how easy and perfect and right for each other they are.

“You snogged the shit out of Louis the moment you saw him,” he says, trying not to be bitter, “so don’t talk to me about any confusion there.”

Judging by their faces, he doesn’t do a very good job on the not-bitter front. “Zayn, baby,” Louis says softly, frowning. “C’mere.”

Zayn slides to his knees in front of him, feeling lost. Louis tips his face up so he can look him in the eye. “You’re making this way too complicated,” he says. “What are you so scared of?”

Zayn firms his lips. “Danielle,” he says, the name dropping off his tongue like a lead weight.

Louis’ hands still on his neck, and Harry sits up, pulling his knees into his chest, watching the two of them. 

“Cases like her are rare,” Louis says softly. “You know that, you know that better than anyone, you’re the one that told _me_ that shit only happens once a generation.”

Zayn lifts a shoulder. “Maybe I was wrong, though. My sources weren’t exactly well-founded—“

“Because we’re talking about a secret phenomenon that only happens to _people with superpowers_ ,” Louis points out. “There’s not going to be a wealth of evidence either way.”

“Um,” says Harry, his arms around his knees, “Who’s Danielle?”

Zayn licks his lips and drops his eyes. Louis keeps one hand on his neck and uses the other to pull Harry into his side, petting his hair. “Danielle was Liam’s Dream,” he says softly. 

Harry’s eyes go wide. “Was?”

Zayn wraps his hands around Louis’ calves and remembers Liam’s face, the first time he told the story, sitting curled in on himself in the flat they’d shared above the bar. He remembers the way he cried like he’d forgotten how to do anything else, like he had nothing in him but tears.

“She was already engaged,” he says. “When he found her, and. When he explained who he was, showed her his powers, told her what it _meant_ , s-she couldn’t process it.”

Louis shakes his head. “This stranger showing up, the idea that the world around her wasn’t what she thought, and on top of that, her relationship with her fiancée wasn’t real, wasn’t _destined_ …It was too much.” He presses his lips into Harry’s hair. “She killed herself.”

“ _No,_ ” Harry breathes, and buries his face in Louis’ shoulder. Louis tightens his arm around him, his eyes troubled.

Zayn tips his forehead into Louis’ knee. “I need to go slowly with him,” he breathes. “I _need_ to, Lou, I can’t risk it.” He squeezes his eyes closed. “There’s so much we don’t know about this, this _thing_ that’s happening to us, like, like what’s going on with Perrie—“

“Just because she doesn’t remember her Dreams,“ Louis starts, “doesn’t mean—“

“—doesn’t mean she wants you using her as an excuse not to talk to yours,” Perrie says, from behind the couch, and Zayn raises his head to look at her. She’s wearing one of his shirts and her hair’s a tangled cloud around her head and he can’t help but smile, just a little.

Louis grins up at her. “Hey, Per,” he says, and she musses his hair affectionately. 

“Lou,” she greets, and then winks at Harry, “Hey, Sexy.”

“Hey, Sexy,” Harry replies from where he still has his face smushed into Louis’ chest.

“You have no evidence at all that Niall will be another Danielle,” Perrie says, perching on the arm of the chair next to Harry. “He wants to know, Zayn, all he does is ask questions.”

“I thought he was going to jump off a bridge,” Zayn says shortly. “I watched him stand up on the rail and I thought—“ he swallows, hard.

Perrie comes to kneel by him. “But he wasn’t,” she says. “Even if I hadn’t talked to him, he wouldn’t have. He’s too grounded.”

The corner of Zayn’s mouth turns up. “Grounded,” he says. “Fitting.”

“S’what Dreams are,” Harry says softly, finally emerging from Louis’ side. “We’re your other halves, your balancing points, so you’ve got something to stay alive for, every time you put yourself in danger.”

Louis smiles at him so tenderly it makes Zayn’s heart clench.

“I want that,” he says, mostly to himself. “So badly, I’m just. I don’t know how to talk to him without scaring him off.”

Louis widens his eyes in mock surprise. “Zayn Malik, struggling to talk to a boy? Now I’ve seen everything.”

“Open your mouth and make noises until they match the stuff in your head,” Harry says.

Zayn rolls his eyes. “Thanks, you two, you’re very helpful.”

“I mean it,” says Harry. “If you say what you mean, it’ll be the right thing to say.” He grins at Zayn. “He’s your density.”

Zayn gapes at him. “Did you just quote Back to the Future at me?”

Louis rolls his eyes. “You should’ve heard him right after I found him.” He adopts a hilarious, growly version of Harry’s low voice, all slow and drawling. “Louehhh, would you say I’m your density? Louehhh, has your density brought me to you?”

“Just be thankful we’ve never met a time-traveller,” Perrie quips, and Harry wrinkles his nose at her.

Zayn shakes his head. “Density or not, how do you even say something like ‘I’ve been dreaming about you for eleven years of my life, and in about half those dreams we are definitely making out, also I think it’s my cosmic purpose to keep you safe from harm?’”

Harry grins at him. “Sounds good to me.”

“Of course it does, that’s like word for word what I said,” Louis says. “Only there was more stumbling around and ‘this is going to sound crazy’s and ‘feel free to punch me in the face’s and then there was ‘oh you’re already kissing me alright yes’.”

Zayn raises his eyebrows at them. “Didn’t the kissing come before the explanation?”

Louis smirks. “Only the drunk kissing,” he says, and Harry hums in agreement, playing idly with his fingers. He presses a kiss to the inside of Louis’ wrist and then sighs, looking at Zayn.

“You want us to help?” He asks. “I could talk to him, like. 

Zayn blinks at him. “Really? You don’t have to be back in Paris?”

Louis shakes his head, his fringe falling into his eyes. He smiles at Zayn slow and squinting. “We’re taking a week or so off,” he says, and licks his lips. “Liam came by and offered to take over.”

Zayn blinks and swallows and feels, unfairly, kind of hurt. “Oh,” he says. “He didn’t, um.”

“’Course he didn’t,” Louis says gently. “You’re off finding your Dream, he’s the last person who’s going to do _anything_ to jeopardize that.”

Zayn stares at the floor. “He could’ve at least called.”

“And put the thought of Danielle even more at the forefront of your mind than it already was?” says Perrie gently. “He’s going to steer clear until you and Niall are well forged together, and I think he’s right to do so.”

Zayn nods, knowing she’s right, but he misses Liam a _lot_ , even more now that the rest of them are here. The empty spot on the couch looks like it’s glaring at him. “How is he?” he asks.

Louis shrugs. “Alright,” he says. “Stable, seems like.” He grins at Zayn. “He told me to kiss you for him, unless your Dream was watching.”

Zayn laughs. “Of course he did.” He scratches at his face. God, he needs to shave. “And here I thought that kiss earlier was from you.”

“It was,” says Louis. “He specified his have tongue, I figured doing that without warning might just confuse you further.”

Zayn wrinkles his nose. “Possible,” he says, and feels his smile linger, and that’s nice, the idea that he’s not just happy for a moment but maybe happy in _general_ , maybe he can _be_ happy in general. He licks his lips. “Would you mind talking to him?” he asks Harry. “Niall, that is, not Liam.”

Harry smiles at him. “Of course not. Not often I get to hang with normals.” He elbows Louis in the side. “This guy takes up all my time and never lets me see any of my friends.”

Louis rolls his eyes at him. “Y’know,” he says to Zayn, “if you wait much longer he’s going to start dreaming, and that might make things easier.”

“Or harder,” Perrie says, and stands. “I’m going back to sleep. Anyone with me?”

“Please,” sighs Louis, also standing, and he pulls Harry to his feet as well. “It took sixteen jumps to get over here, and three of those were in awful fucking rainstorms, impossible to get my bearings. I’m exhausted.”

Harry just nods, slipping his other arm around Perrie’s waist, and Perrie looks back at Zayn, sitting alone on his own floor. “Well?” she asks.

Zayn takes a breath and stands, accepting the hand that Louis holds out to him. He goes to sleep at last, curled against the slow-breathing bodies of three people he loves, and the emptiness of his dreams looks more like a promise than a lack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C'mon did you really think I would write something that wasn't secretly OT5 romantic friendship feels because if so man you did not take my first foray into this fandom to heart
> 
> Anyway I love you! I hope you're enjoying this thing.


	3. Chapter 3

Niall swallows hard. “I, I haven’t,” he stammers. “I’ve never—“

Zayn cuts him off with fingers at his lips, his eyes gone dark. He slides his thumb across Niall’s mouth and Niall’s lips part embarassingly, involuntarily. He takes a shaky breath and, daringly, scrapes his teeth across the pad of Zayn’s thumb.

Zayn licks his own lips and Niall doesn’t know where to look, can’t hold all of him in his eyes at once, the slightly too-quick rise and fall of his bare chest, the wing tattoos stark below his collarbones, the wet parting of his lips, the naked want in his eyes. He wants Zayn like this forever and he can’t stand having Zayn like this for another _second_ , he needs one of them to move, needs something, anything, to happen. It’s never been like this with girls—girls are fun and hot but there’s never been this tension, thick in his throat, stopping any words he might say even if he’d had any words to say what he wants, what he feels.

Zayn’s other hand curls around the back of his neck. “You have no idea,” he says, his fingers still on Niall’s lips, “how long I’ve wanted to do this,” and he sinks to his knees, his breath hot against Niall’s stomach.

Niall wakes up so hard he’s _aching_. Josh is rubbing his eyes from his own bed, yawning and scratching at his stubble. He raises his eyebrows when he sees Niall. “Good dream, mate?” he says archly, and Niall throws a pillow at him, feeling himself flush red all over.

He stumbles down the hall and into the shower, barely waiting for the water to be above freezing cold before he takes himself in his hand, jacking himself off fast and hard and trying not to think, but Zayn’s face intrudes, dark-eyed and fascinated and _eager_. He comes with a grunt he can’t quite suppress, loud in the empty dorm bathroom, and flips the water to cold, letting his head hang under the spray.

Okay. Okay. This is new.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. Half his friends in high school had thought he and Josh were dating, or at the very least were in denial about wanting to date, but like. He loves Josh, a whole lot, and obviously Josh is cute—Niall takes pictures of Josh pretty much every day because of how cute he is—but he’s never wanted him, never thought of him as sexy or hot or anything but, like, a dude a girl would want to date.

He remembers Zayn on the rooftop, Zayn kissed by the sun, the feel of Zayn’s arms around him, and. Yeah, this is very new.

He turns off the shower.

The weirdest thing—well, second weirdest, after the whole Zayn being male part—is how detailed the dream was, with dialogue and everything. Niall’s had wet dreams before, what boy hasn’t, but they’ve always been very unspecific, just a pretty mouth or delicate hands or a beautiful, nameless girl grasping and needy and wet for him, not. Not anything like this one.

He wonders for the space of the walk back to his room whether or not he should tell Josh. He should, he decides, if it happens again, but for now. For now he’s going to concentrate on getting the smooth, practiced way Zayn slid to his knees out of his head. It’s probably a fluke, brought on by how much he admires Zayn and the fact that he’s a _superhero_ and something in him got the _looking up to_ and _wanting to fuck_ wires confused.

He runs a hand through his hair and gets dressed. It’s been two days since he saw Zayn and Perrie, and he’s going back to the coffee shop to finish applying, because none of the other jobs have come through and if he’s going to be seeing Perrie again he _needs_ to be able to take pictures of her. She’s got a happiness to her that’s completely different than Josh’s or anyone else’s he’s ever seen, except the flashes of fondness he saw in Zayn’s face when he first grabbed his hand. _That_ he wants to document more than anything in the world, all of a sudden and consumingly. That and the tattoos on his chest that he doesn’t even know for sure he has and the look on his face when Niall bit the pad of his thumb—

He shoulders his way out of the door of his dorm and texts Jade to meet him at the coffee shop. Maybe if he talks to a girl he knows and likes it’ll, like. Do something, push whatever this weird fixation is out of his head.

Perrie’s already in the coffee shop when he gets there, and he very nearly just turns around and leaves, but Jade’s meeting him here and it would be really stupid to let a fucking _wet dream_ distract him from learning about fucking superheroes, and also maybe Zayn will be with her and he’ll see him and realize that nothing like his dream will ever happen ever, and that’ll be that.

Zayn’s not with her, but there’s a tall boy with wide features and sculpted curls curled into the chair next to her, and he almost reneges on his decision and leaves them alone when she spots him and motions him over. He waves back, kind of hesitantly, and slides up to the table.

“Niall,” Perrie says, “this is Harry. Harry, Niall.”

“Hello, Harry,” says Niall.

Harry grins like sunshine and Niall wonders if there’s a special lesson on how to be a certain kind of happy that happens when you’re inducted into being a superhero. If this kid even is a superhero. He bites his lip. “Um,” he says, and looks sidelong at Perrie. “Does he, uh, work with you and Zayn?”

Harry’s smile turns wicked. “Only in a supporting role,” he says, somehow making that sound dirty, and then laughs. “I’m not, er,” he wiggles his fingers. “Gifted, like them, but I know.”

Niall nods and feels better about himself, somehow, like he’s not intruding on a private world if Harry can be here, too.

Perrie rolls her eyes. “You’re an idiot,” she says to Harry, but it’s endlessly fond. “Supporting role indeed.”

“It is!” Harry protests. "I help prepare him for battle all the time."

“Blowjobs,” Perrie retorts, “are not support.”

Niall freezes. “Um,” he says, “what?” The persistent image in his head is superseded with alarming speed by one of this, this pretty curly-haired kid sinking to his knees for _Zayn_ , and that makes something in his stomach twist up tight.

“A superhero,” says Harry loftily, “cannot be expected to put himself on the line distracted by any stray sexual urges, and it is my duty to satisfy those urges.” He smirks. “With my mouth.”

Perrie scoffs, turning back to Niall. If she _is_ a mind-reader she is very, very good at hiding her reactions, because she doesn’t seem to notice the skipping record that is Niall’s brain right now. “This one,” she says, jerking her thumb at Harry, “is dating someone we used to work with, and seems to think that makes him _important_ or something.”

Niall blinks, and the mental images fade a little. “Oh,” he says, “s-so your, um, support, it’s not—for Zayn?”

Harry’s eyebrows shoot up, and he looks at Niall with an expression that is way, way too knowing for his peace of mind. “Nah,” he says at last. “I mean, there was that one time, but that was mostly to make Louis jealous, and Zayn was too into Liam at the time to really appreciate it.”

“Harry—“ Perrie says, warningly, though Niall doesn’t see why. If anything, Harry’s just now getting _less_ rude, and Perrie’s the one who brought up blowjobs in the first place.

Harry bites his lip but stops talking, and Niall says, into the slightly awkward silence, “Uh, who’s Liam?”

“Someone who we used to work with,” Perrie says, at the same time as Harry says, “Zayn’s ex-boyfriend.” Perrie shoots Harry another look, and then sighs. “Both,” she says.

“Oh,” says Niall, and tries not to connect _Zayn liking men_ with _him maybe possibly liking Zayn_ , but that’s pretty much impossible, so he stands, feeling a little blank and overwhelmed. “I’m, um, gonna get some coffee.”

Perrie nods, and as soon as he turns away he hears her hiss at Harry, “ _What the hell—_ ”

He lingers long enough to hear Harry mutter back, “ _I don’t see why we have to be so roundabout with this_ —“ and then he’s heading towards the counter because this is really none of his business. 

He stands in line, and okay, so he dreamed about Zayn and then Zayn turns out to be gay. That’s fine. He must have a good gaydar, or something. It doesn’t mean Zayn’s into him, and hell, he doesn’t really know if he’s into _Zayn_ although he definitely would be if it turned out he liked boys because, like. Fuck.

He runs a hand over his face and orders his coffee.

By the time he gets back to the table Harry’s gone, though he didn’t hear the bell at the door. Perrie smiles at him, though a little distantly. “He’ll be back,” she says. 

Niall nods and sips his coffee. “He seems nice.”

She smiles more genuinely. “He is nice. Overwhelmingly stupid, but kind of the nicest boy I know.” She squints. “Sorry about the, y’know. We’re very used to just kind of talking about everything?”

Niall shrugs. “What’s a coffee date with friends without a little blowjob talk?” he attempts to joke.

She laughs, so he can’t have done too badly, and tucks her hair behind her ears. His brain, desperate to find something else to talk about, seizes on the glint of her earrings in the morning sun.

“Hold on,” he says, “if you’re indestructible how d’you have all the piercings?”

She widens her eyes in fake shock. “You’ve figured it out. It’s all a trick. Zayn uses a crane and strings.”

Niall makes a face at her. “I know, I know, you’re tired of the questions.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “I get it, you know? It’s just. I don’t want to sound weird.”

Niall raises his eyebrows and waits.

Perrie sighs. “I’m not indestructible,” she says, “I just heal very, very fast. So fast I don’t even usually feel the pain, unless whatever hit me, like, stays in my flesh.” She gestures to her face and ears. “Hence these. They still heal immediately but they’re like, reminders? And they hurt, at first, because I can tug at them and twist them and that pain, like. Anchors me.” She shrugs a little. “We’re an unstable bunch, we need _something_ , and the.” She stops and swallows. “I don’t think I have what the others do.”

Niall blinks at her. “What do the others have?”

Perrie shakes her head. “Not for me to say,” she says. “You can ask Harry when he gets back, if you like, he knows more about it than most, but. My advice would be to ask Zayn.”

“If I ever see him again,” Niall says, and hears it come out surprisingly self-pitying.

Perrie reaches out to take his hand. “You will,” she says, voice more reassuring than maybe the situation demands. Her eyes flicker to someone behind him, and she lets go. “So, yeah,” she says, slightly louder, “the piercings thing is about control, I guess.”

“I get that,” says Jade, stepping up behind Niall. “I know someone who feels the same way about tattoos.” She smiles at Niall. “Hey, Niall. Who’s your friend?”

Niall smiles back at her. She’s very pretty, and very sweet, and doing absolutely nothing to help detangle the confused mess of his brain. “Hey, Jade,” he greets. “This is Perrie. Perrie, this is my friend Jade.”

Jade smiles and holds out a hand. “Hey,” she says.

Perrie takes her hand, her eyes a little wide, and when Jade squeezes it she _blushes_ , her pale pale cheeks going a little pink. Niall stares at her, baffled, but she doesn’t even notice.

“Nice to meet you,” Perrie says, and lets go of Jade’s hand with a visible effort. “Uh, you, you want some coffee? I was going to. Get some coffee.” 

Jade nods, slowly. “Sure.” She’s got a strange expression, too, like she’s trying to remember something, but just shakes her head and walks off to the counter, Perrie at her heels.

Harry emerges from the back hallway, looking inexplicably windblown, and slides in next to Niall. Niall shoots him a smile, then turns to stare at Perrie and Jade, who are chatting like they’re already best friends, heads bent together. “I do not understand girls,” he says.

Harry cocks his head at him. “Why not? They’re just people.”

Niall shakes his head at him. “It’s different for you, you’re gay,” he says, and then panics a little. “Sorry, was that weird, I don’t.”

Harry laughs at him, but kindly. “Wasn’t weird. Was, however, incorrect. I’m not gay. I’m, I guess the kids would say ‘pansexual’, but at this point it doesn’t matter.”

Niall raises his eyebrows at him. “It doesn’t matter?”

Harry shakes his head, his smile turning secret and fond, and Niall is unbearably frustrated that he doesn’t have a camera on him today. “I’m taken, and will be ‘til the day I die,” he says, no hesitation at all in his voice.

Niall stares at him. He’s so _young_ , younger than Niall, even, younger than Josh, but there’s nothing of the _fuck the man_ attitude that all the couples in Niall’s high school who were certain that they’d be together forever had. He’s not making any claims of rebellion against “rules” that say young romance doesn’t last; he just _is_ certain, set and certain and so happy to be there it makes blows Niall’s mind a little bit. “You’re so sure,” he says wonderingly.

Harry shrugs a little. “I just know,” he says easily. “Louis is it, for me, that’s all there is to it.”

Niall sips his coffee. “How’d you meet?” he asks.

Harry beams. “He saved my life,” he says simply.

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Niall mutters into his drink, and then freezes. “Not that I’m saying—Zayn’s not—“ he stumbles to a halt.

Harry’s face is unreadable. “Isn’t he?” he says, but that could mean _anything_ because Niall didn’t actually _say_ anything.

“What?” asks Niall.

“What?” parrots Harry back, and steals a sip of Niall’s coffee.

Niall runs a hand through his hair, feeling perpetually confused. “What, um, what can he do?” He lifts a hand a waggles his fingers in approximation of what Harry had done earlier. “His, his ‘Gift’, I mean.”

Harry grins wide at him. “He’s a teleporter.”

Niall gapes. “No way,” he says. “I don’t believe you.” Flight and, like, Perrie’s fast-healing thing, sure, those are unbelievable but they’re still just thing humans maybe could do in a while with a lot of science involved, maybe, but _teleportation?_

Harry bites his lip and pulls out his phone. “I’ll show you,” he says. He stares out the window, texting without looking at his hands, and then points. “You see that window?”

Niall follows his hand. Across the street there’s a corner store, and above the corner store is an apartment where someone has left the blinds open. Niall can see in to an empty room, a bookshelf and maybe a chair. “Sure,” he says, dubious.

Harry glances at his phone. “Keep watching,” he says, and Niall does.

All of a sudden there’s a boy in the window. He’s slight and wiry, his features sharp where Harry’s are wide, and he’s staring right at Niall. He gives a little wave, blows a kiss at Harry, and then there’s no boy in the window anymore.

“Oh,” says Niall.

Harry laughs. “He’s fit, right?”

Niall shrugs. “Sure,” he says, and then thinks about that, because it hadn’t even crossed his mind. He thinks about Harry, and turns again to look at him. It’s like looking at Josh, only moreso: he’s clearly terribly attractive, but Niall’s not terribly attracted _to_ him.

Which means this morning was a fluke, or it’s just about Zayn.

Perrie and Jade return at last, both looking so happy that Niall figures it’s a fucking conspiracy to make him feel extra, extra bad about having broken his camera. Perrie is biting her lip. “I’m gonna go,” she says, only a little apologetic. “I, um.” She looks at Harry. “I’ll be back to the flat later but tell Zayn—“ She takes a breath. “Tell Zayn I’ve started to _remember_ ,” she says slowly, putting stress on the word, “and it’s still very confusing but I have help.” She grins at Jade and Niall realizes they’re holding hands, and feels somehow cheated. 

“Oh my god, Perrie,” Harry says, looking stunned, and then he’s on his feet and hugging her and she’s laughing and possibly crying a little bit, and Niall feels like he’s stumbled onto the set of a film that he knows nothing about and everyone expects him to know his lines.

He tries to catch Jade’s eye but she’s staring at Perrie with a dazed, wondering smile. Harry finally lets go, still laughing, and sits back down at the table. Perrie turns to Niall, beaming, and then lunges forward and kisses him hard on the mouth. “Thank you,” she says fiercely against his lips, and then she’s dragging Jade away out into the street. Jade looks back at Niall and mouths, _call me_.

"Did...she just kissed me," Niall says, and turns back to Harry, who’s furiously texting. “Okay, what the hell?”

Harry beams at him distractedly. “You did something amazing, bringing that girl here,” he says.

“Okay,” Niall says slowly, “but. What?”

Harry looks up from his phone and must see something in Niall’s face, because he stops texting, his face turning soft. “I’m sorry,” he says sincerely, “this must be unbelievably confusing. I know it was for me, and there is _way_ more going on now then there was then.”

Niall laughs a little. “Unbelievably confusing about sums it up, yeah.”

Harry bites his lip, not smiling for what feels like the first time since Niall first saw him. He looks worried and conflicted. “I would explain it but.” He spreads his hands. “It’s not really mine to explain?”

Niall sighs. “That’s what Perrie said, too. She said I should ask Zayn.”

Harry frowns more. “You shouldn’t have to ask. He should’ve said as soon as he found you, if you ask me.”

Niall’s eyebrows shoot up. “Found me? You mean when he saved me?”

Harry winces. “Shit,” he says. “I offer to talk to you and all I do is make things worse. Look, is there. Do you want to just, like, hang out? If I haven’t convinced you I’m absolutely insane, yet. I’ll answer any questions you have about the whole, y’know, superhero thing, and if it gets too close to Zayn’s stuff I’ll just tell you.”

Niall studies him a minute. “This might sound weird,” he says, “but could I take your picture?”

Harry laughs and brushes his curls out his eyes. “What?”

“Like, a photoshoot?” Niall hazards. “I’m a photography major, I’m doing this project where I take, like, pictures of happy people?” He lifts one shoulder, feeling a little awkward. “I’ve never seen anyone who’s happy like you when you talk about Louis, so.”

Harry narrows his eyes at him. “So you’re saying you want to take flattering pictures of me while I talk about my boyfriend? Are you sure you’re real, and not some kind of genie sent to fulfill my every desire?”

“Mate, you’re dating a teleporter, you’re friends with an invincible girl and a flying boy, and you think _I’m_ the one with powers? You’re mental,” Niall laughs.

Harry stands and stretches. “Maybe so,” he says. “I certainly thought so when I started dreaming about Louis.”

Niall freezes, halfway out of his seat. “What?”

Harry looks at him sideways. “Did I not mention? Like a week before he saved my life, I started having these really weird, detailed dreams about him. Some of them were sexual but others were just, like, happy? It was the craziest thing.”

“Weird,” says Niall, to cover up the pounding of his heart.

“Right?” says Harry, grinning, and he leads the way out of the coffee shop, his hands shoved into his pockets. “So,” he says, “where do you want me?”


	4. Chapter 4

“We smoked,” Harry says, “and then he took pictures of me smiling.” He wrinkles his nose. “It was cute, he’s cute.”

“Oy,” says Zayn warningly, shooting him a look.

Harry laughs, pushing a hand through his hair. “Like you have anything to worry about.”

Zayn shrugs. “I do,” he says, and slumps back against the couch.

“Babe,” says Harry, drawing it out. He’s started imitating Louis' habit of calling Zayn babe or baby, and Zayn kind of loves it, the familiarity of it, feels like Harry’s slotted into a place that he didn’t even know existed before Louis found him. “He saw Louis and when I was like ‘he’s fit, right’ he didn’t even bat a fucking eye.”

Zayn blinks at him. “He’s not attracted to Lou?”

Harry spreads his hands. “Apparently not.”

Zayn groans and closes his eyes. “He _is_ straight.”

“Hold up,” Harry says, and Zayn feels him flop over so his head’s in Zayn’s lap. “He didn’t bat an eye about Lou but when I mentioned I’d given you a blowjob—“

“Harry,” Zayn hisses, opening his eyes, “What the hell—“

“It came up!” Harry protests, grinning up at him. “It wasn’t out of line, I promise. My point is that he looked like he was about to swallows his own tongue in jealousy.” He holds up a long finger and counts. “That, plus the color he turned when I mentioned I’d dreamt about Louis before I met him, plus the way he definitely indirectly equated me and Louis to him and you _right after_ I mentioned that Louis was basically my end-all and be-all, soulmate style…” He reaches up to boop Zayn on the nose. “Trust me, he’s far gone on you, mate. I know smitten, and he’s smitten in spades.”

Louis blinks into being by the bar, spinning to look at them, and Zayn laughs at his timing. Louis casts him a curious glance, but speaks to Harry. “Haz, did you by chance leave your phone somewhere idiotic again?”

Harry squeezes his eyes closed. “Shit.”

“This isn’t going to work if we don’t keep working at it,” Louis reprimands him. “You said you would be serious about this.”

“I am,” Harry protests, and levers himself up from the couch. “Niall’s got it, I’ll go and get it from him, no need for you to scare the shit out of him popping in there.” He lets himself out of Zayn’s flat, giving a little wave.

Louis watches him go, shaking his head, and Zayn raises his eyebrows at him, “What isn’t going to work?”

Louis shrugs a shoulder. “We’re trying something. Pushing the boundaries of the bond, you know? I’ll let you know when I know.”

Zayn nods, standing up and wandering over to his window. “Harry likes him,” he says.

Louis snorts. “You were scared he wouldn’t? Harry likes everyone _and_ Niall’s gonna be one of us, of course Harry likes him.”

Zayn lets that roll around in his head. _One of us_. It's. Odd, to think of Niall with the three of them. Four of them, though Liam's. Liam's not around, hasn't been around much since Harry started to be.

“I should be out there,” he says, staring down from his window at the street. It’s sunset and he hasn’t left his flat all day and he’s itching to fly, to slip back into his routine, but he’s itching even more to go find Niall, and the combination is paralyzing.

“If you mean out there finding him, then yes,” Louis says, and Zayn can see him reflected in the glass, watching him. “If you mean out there saving people, then no.” He comes to stand behind Zayn, hooking his chin over his shoulder and following his gaze. “They can do without you for a night, babe. That’s what me and Perrie are for.”

Zayn closes his eyes and leans back into him. “What’s wrong with me?” he asks, and it comes out weaker than he means it, more self-pitying.

He can hear the roll of Louis’ eyes in his voice. “You’re kidding, right?”

Zayn shakes his head until Louis digs his chin painfully into his shoulder, and then he stops. “Perrie,” he starts. “She doesn’t even remember her Dream and she’s already…” he trails off, thinking about Perrie’s voice on the phone when she’d called him, how perfectly, incredibly _happy_ she’d been. _Her name’s Jade_ , she’d said, _and there’s still something weird, it’s not all fit together yet but she knows me, she’s dreamt me, this is real_.

Louis’ arms slide around his middle. “You’re stupid,” he says drily in Zayn’s ear. “That’s what’s wrong with you. And you’re still not telling me everything.”

Zayn sighs. “You know the rest.”

“I’d hoped you’d gotten over your teenage rebellious phase,” Louis says, voice going hard, and pinches Zayn’s sides hard enough to hurt. “Fate is bullshit, blah blah blah.”

“It’s not _rebellion_ to want you to still matter to me,” Zayn snaps, reacting to the pain and to the tone and to evening outside that he isn’t in, that he isn’t helping, that he isn’t part of. He squirms his way out of Louis arms and Louis lets him go.

For a second, at least, but as soon as Zayn’s turned to face him he grabs his hands, quick but gentle. “It’s _stupid_ ,” he says calmly, “to think that your Dream will change that.” He regards Zayn with clear eyes. “Harry didn’t change us, the part of us that matters,” he says. “Why would Niall?”

Zayn drops his eyes, knowing he’s right. “It’s just,” he says, “it’s Liam, too, it’s. _Me_ , it’s. What, what will I do? After? What will I be? Will the four of us, will we still be—will I still be…” He trails off, because he is sucking really hard at words, and Louis laughs at him, flicking his hair out of his eyes with slender fingers. He’s happy and self-assured and as beautiful as he always has been, and for the space of three long blinks Zayn wants everything to go back to when he was fifteen and Louis was seventeen and they were unsure of anything but each other.

Louis feels it too, he can see it in his eyes. He smiles a little, soft, and says, “That’s not how it works.”

Zayn smiles back. “Yeah,” he says, “I know.”

Louis wrinkles his nose in thought and the moment is gone. “Think about it like this,” he says. “He’s basically been with you all your life, and he still is, only now he _physically_ is, and you can kiss him and pick him up and shit.”

Zayn laughs at him and lets Louis pull him in by his hands, buries his face in Louis’ neck when Louis hugs him tight. “I’m so happy for you,” Louis mutters fiercely in his ear. “Jealous and crazy and scared and so, so happy, because you deserve this, okay?”

“Okay,” says Zayn against his pulse. 

“Good,” says Louis, and pulls back, dusting off his shoulders like he’s making him presentable. Zayn raises an eyebrow at him, and Louis smiles. “Harry’s coming back,” he says, “and he says Niall’s got a gig to get to.” He blinks, slow. “At a coffee shop.”

Zayn takes a sharp breath. “ _Oh,_ ” he says.

“Oh,” Louis parrots.

Zayn wants to kiss him in thanks and in appreciation and a little bit, maybe, in goodbye, but he could do so for hours and it wouldn’t mean what he wants it to mean, so he just says, “Lou.”

Louis licks his lips, grinning at him. “Go on, then,” he says, and Zayn’s already sliding the window open and stepping out into the wind.

He walks into the coffee shop and feels the world slot into place.

Louis had said it was like falling asleep standing up, the first time you actually lived out one of the recurring dreams. For Zayn it’s more like shrugging into his mother’s old jacket—there’s a boy smoking cigarettes outside and the smell and smoke of it follow him in and the shop itself smells like coffee and he feels like he’s walking on eggshells, like if he moves wrong he’ll wake and everything, _everything_ will have been a dream, he’ll be back in his mother’s house ready to leap off the roof of the shed and start it all over again.

But Niall’s there, on the stage, his lashes sweeping his freckled cheeks, guitar on his knee, exactly as he had been on Zayn’s ninth birthday and every birthday after. Only now Zayn hears more than three lines of his song, now Zayn can step forward and really, truly watch him, now Zayn knows his name and the way that he laughs and what he feels like when he’s pressed close to Zayn’s chest, protected and right.

Now Niall lifts his eyes and meets Zayn’s, and he smiles like daybreak. He has a sweet, lilting sort of voice, a voice made for a room like this, where it can fill every corner. Zayn smiles back, helplessly, hopelessly happy, and lets himself stare.

When Niall’s through with his songs he hops lightly down from the stool, says a quick “Thank you” into the microphone, and leaves the stage. Zayn slips through the tables to intercept him, catches him as he hugs another boy, someone Zayn’s seen him with a lot, short and cheerful and exactly the kind of friend Zayn would expect Niall to have. Niall pulls back from the hug, muttering, “Thanks, mate,” and then sees Zayn where he’s waiting.

“Oh,” he says, and his daybreak-smile creeps onto his face again. “Hey.”

“Hey,” says Zayn, itching to smoke just so he has something to do with his mouth that isn’t kiss the smile off Niall’s face, something to do with his hands that isn’t pull him in and never let him go. 

“Um, Zayn, this is my friend Josh,” Niall says, and indicates the friend he’d been hugging. Josh gives a little wave, eyes curious. “Cheers,” he greets.

“Josh, this is Zayn,” Niall says, and then his mouth works a little. “He, uh.”

“I’m in his history of photo class,” Zayn says easily. “Can I talk to you for a minute? I really need a smoke, though, so maybe outside?”

Niall swallows, a movement that Zayn has to make an effort not to watch, and then nods. “Yeah, ‘course,” he says, and nods to Josh. “I’ll be back in a while, yeah.”

“Yeah, yeah, leave me to clean up your mess,” Josh grumbles, but it’s good-natured, and he punches Niall in the shoulder as a goodbye. Zayn leads the way through the tables and outside, already pulling a cigarette from his pocket.

“I figure I owe you some answers,” he says softly, turning to face Niall once they’re out under the open sky. Here, where he doesn’t feel like he’s wading through a thousand layers of dream, it’s easier to keep his hands to himself. Not a lot easier, but easier.

Niall laughs a little. “Mate, you don’t owe me anything, You saved my life, you could ask me for anything in the world and I’d do it.” His whole face stutters, like he realizes what he’s just said, and Zayn wants to laugh and kiss him and laugh and _kiss him_ , so he lights a cigarette instead.

“That, um, that said,” Niall says, his cheeks a little pink, “I do have quite a lot of questions.”

Zayn nods, not looking away from his face. It’s nice, to just be…talking to him, not avoiding anything, not worrying, just. Them. Here. “Ask,” he prompts.

Niall takes a breath. “Harry said you _found_ me. What did he mean?”

Zayn does laugh at that. “Actually it was an accident, the thing with the bus.”

Niall’s brows draw together quizzically. “You saved me by accident?”

Zayn shook his head. “I saved you on purpose,” he says, “I just didn’t know you were _you_.” He takes a drag of the cigarette and blows it out to the stars. “When I looked at you and saw who you were I nearly had a heart attack.”

He looks sideways at Niall, lets himself, this time, watch the bob of his throat as he swallows. “Who am I?” Niall asks in a voice that’s a little smaller than it should be.

Zayn takes a step towards him. “There’s no way to say this that isn’t going to sound kind of crazy and dumb,” he warns, and then gets it over with. “You’re my Dream.”

Niall blinks at him. “I’m your what?”

Zayn takes a breath and drops his cigarette. He wants to be clear-voiced for this, somehow, wants to do it in one take because he doesn’t really get another chance. “We think they’re like anchors,” he says. “Those of us with powers, we. We all dream, all the time, of a certain person, someone we’re somehow…meant to save, and someone who’s meant to save us, in an emotional sense? A, another half, a balancing point, keeping us grounded, keeping us real.” He takes another step towards Niall, and Niall doesn’t move back. “Stupid as it might sound, that bus accident was destined. This, us, we’re…” he spreads his hands. “Fated.”

Niall stares at him for a long time, silent, and Zayn bites his lip. “You said you’d do anything if I asked.”

Niall takes a sharp breath, but nods. 

Zayn closes the gap between them, takes Niall’s hands in his. “I’m asking you to believe me,” he says softly, and Niall’s eyes are huge in his face. He licks his lips and Zayn’s eyes catch on the motion, his whole body swaying forward involuntarily.

“This. Connection, between superhero and dream,” Niall says, his voice a little shaky, “it’s romantic?”

“Usually,” Zayn says, his heart pounding against his ribs, “incredibly so.”

Niall nods, his eyes dropping to Zayn’s mouth, and Zayn’s not even aware of leaning in, maybe he doesn’t, maybe Niall does, but their noses nudge and then Niall’s lips are on his, slow and careful like he’s not sure it’s the right thing to do. Zayn’s hands are on his hips and he wants, god, he _wants_ , but he doesn’t want to push Niall into anything, so he kisses him again, a little harder, and then pulls back just enough to breathe, their foreheads tipped together. “I need you to know,” he starts, and Niall kisses him again, interrupting him. Zayn sighs a laugh against his mouth and tries again. “I’m not—“ he gets out and then Niall’s mouth is against his again, barely a peck this time because he’s grinning too much to kiss right, and Zayn digs his fingers into Niall’s sides in overwhelmingly fond exasperation. “ _Niall,_ ” he complains.

Niall yelps and bats at his hands, dancing away a little, but not far away enough that they’re not still touching, fingers linked through fingers. “Sorry,” he says, not sorry at all. “You’re fun to kiss.”

Zayn is pretty sure he will never stop smiling for the rest of his life. “Thanks,” he says, and licks his lips. “So this isn’t. You don’t.”

Niall wrinkles his nose. “This is the part where you worry you’re pressuring me into something I don’t want, and I tell you I’m really mostly straight, and then you go all Batman, right?”

Zayn bites his lip. “All Batman, huh?”

Niall shrugs, going a little red. “With, like, the rooftops and all. Very broody.” He shakes his head. “I am mostly straight,” he says, “but. Harry and Louis, they’re. Harry is to Louis what I am to you, right?”

Zayn nods. “Approximately. We’re different people, obviously, but it’s the same kind of bond.”

Niall nods. “Then to paraphrase something Harry said, it doesn’t matter that I’m mostly straight.” He leans back into Zayn’s space. “I thought you were a famous rock star when I first saw you.”

Zayn coughs a laugh, a little disappointed at the change in subject, because he really wants to know what that means, _it doesn’t matter._ “Did you?”

Niall nods, his nose brushing Zayn’s cheek, and god, Zayn wants him this close forever, isn’t sure how he survived nineteen years without him right here, breathing shared air. “You’re fit enough to be,” Niall says, and Zayn has a tiny smug moment, “but there was more to it than that, like I felt like I should know you, like I’d seen you before.” His lips move over Zayn’s cheekbone and Zayn slips his hands into his hair. “Mum always said I had good foresight,” Niall murmurs, and Zayn closes his eyes and tilts his head so they’re kissing again.

Niall finally pulls back, regretful. “Josh will probably come looking for me soon,” he says.

Zayn curls his hands at the nape of Niall’s neck. “Is that my cue to stop kissing you?” he asks, resigned.

“That,” Niall says with a grin, “or fly away with me into the night.” He slides his arms around Zayn’s back and holds on, expectant.

Zayn shakes his head, grinning helplessly over Niall’s shoulder. “Ready?” he asks softly, and Niall nods against his neck and then Zayn turns his palms downward and pushes, and it’s easier than it’s ever been to sail upwards into the sky.

He takes Niall back to his flat. He doesn’t really think about what that means, he just does it because he does it, and Niall doesn’t really seem to mind. Zayn alights on his windowsill and guides Niall through the window into the room. Niall lets him go reluctantly, but fitting them both through would be an awkward ordeal and he’d probably end up dropping Niall and that’s really not in the plan for the evening.

“Wow,” says Niall, blinking around at his flat. “This is where you live?”

Zayn clambers through the window after him, following his gaze. “Yeah,” he says. “Nice, right?”

“You’re _loaded_ ,” Niall breathes, taking in the huge windows, hardwood floors, the full bar and spacious living area. Zayn keeps it very clean, because it’s not actually _his_ and he feels bad about messing it up.

“It kind of comes with the job,” Zayn says, and goes to turn on a light.

“You get paid for being a superhero?” Niall asks, disbelieving.

“Only if you take on the stupid amount of work that Zayn and Lou have,” says Harry from the door to the bedroom, illuminated when Zayn flips on the light. “Um,” he says, “Should I be leaving?”

Zayn glances at Niall, because they’re definitely moving at his speed, and Niall looks back, bites his lip. He looks hesitant and worried and so Zayn says to Harry, “Stay, it’s cool,” and crosses to Niall, threading their fingers together. Niall looks a little bit disappointed but mostly relieved, and Zayn nudges up under his jaw to kiss his throat reassuringly.

Harry beams at them. “Congrats, by the way,” he says, and swings himself up over the back of the couch to flop down on it, all graceless limbs.

“Thanks,” says Niall, laughing a little.

“Lou’s out on patrol?” Zayn asks, tugging Niall over so they can collapse next to Harry. He feels lighter than he has in, honestly, maybe years, maybe _ever_ , like he’s lost a weight that he’s had all his life, and calling Dreams anchors doesn’t work, really, because anchors tie you down and Zayn’s never felt more free.

Harry nods. “I texted him the good news, though.”

Zayn raises his eyebrows. “That was fast.”

Harry just shrugs, smirking, and Niall shifts against Zayn’s chest. They’ve ended up with Niall kind of in his lap, Zayn’s arm over his shoulder, their fingers linked. “Um,” Niall says, “what do you mean, on patrol? And what stupid amount of work?”

Harry grins at him. “Zayn here’s kind of Protector of all Dublin.”

“And Perrie,” Zayn protests immediately, but Niall’s already turning to stare at him. 

“Seriously?” he asks.

Zayn nods and smiles at him, feeling it come out slow and fond. “That’s why I Batman,” he says. “So I can see if there are accidents, or like, murders, or anything, that I can prevent. S’why I saved you from that bus.” He doesn’t mention that the hints of Niall’s lilting voice in his dreams are why he chose Dublin in the first place, doesn’t talk about how desperately hopeful and unfounded that decision had been.

“You’re like Superman. You’re literally like Superman,” Niall says, “And Dublin’s your Metropolis.”

“Does that make you my Lois Lane?” Zayn asks him archly, and Niall laughs and wrinkles his nose.

“Nah, nah,” he says. “I’m not nearly cool enough. I’m Jimmy Olson if I’m anyone, what with the camera.”

“Always thought they were a bit gay anyway,” Harry muses, and Zayn laughs, burying his face in Niall’s shoulder. Niall reaches around to stroke his palm across Zayn’s cheek and Zayn presses a kiss to it, giddy.

“What about Louis, then?” Niall asks.

“Paris,” says Harry. “We live there, most of the time.”

“All of Paris, by _himself_?”

Harry shakes his head. “Shares with Nick, a pyro, although he and Louis don’t get along too well.”

“Because that’s not all Nick’d like to share,” Zayn mutters, and Harry shoots him a quelling look.

“Oh my god, superhero soap opera drama,” Niall breathes, and laughs, the joy of it thrumming through him and back into Zayn, too. “How come you’re here now, though? Isn’t that leaving Paris unprotected?”

Harry shrugs a little. “It’s in other hands for a while,” he says, and Zayn could kiss him for not mentioning Liam. “We’re here to make Zayn stop being stupid about you, and to fill in for him while he’s too busy honeymooning to do his job.” He winks at Zayn.

Niall squirms. “You’re here about _me_?” he asks. 

Harry smiles at him. “Why wouldn’t we be? You’re important, mate.”

“I, I’m really not, though,” Niall says, stutteringly, “I’m just a uni kid with a camera and I don’t even have a camera anymore.”

“I’ll get you another one,” Zayn says in his ear, “a nice one, I don’t use my money for anything else and it’s kind of my fault you broke yours in the first place.”

“Oh, yeah,” Niall says sarcastically, turning in his arms so they’re face to face, “I’m really mad you saved me instead of my camera.”

“Should’ve been able to save both,” Zayn murmurs against his mouth, and Niall rolls his eyes but kisses him back. Zayn keeps kissing him when there’s a knock on the door, assuming it’s Perrie being polite, just in case.

He doesn’t stop kissing him until Harry answers it and says, uncertain and concerned, “Liam?”

Zayn's eyes fly open and he pulls back to see Liam slip past Harry, radiating energy. He looks. He's shaved his hair off and he looks wild and _scared_ and there are huge circles under his eyes and he’s breathing like he might’ve been running for days and Zayn’s pretty sure he doesn’t even register Niall’s presence, just stares Zayn down, raw and desperate.

“I need your help,” he says. “Please.”


	5. Chapter 5

Liam never really had what anyone would consider a normal life.

(If he had to mark it down on paper he would divide it into two sections: Before Louis and After Louis. Maybe that isn’t fair, because Louis and Zayn arrived in Liam’s life at the same time, but within “After Louis” there’s another section, marked in invisible ink as just “Zayn”, and that’s different. Shakier and more certain all at once and something Liam doesn’t want to think about too hard.)

He was raised within the walls of the Initiative. His mother had been Gifted, which was lucky – the doctors always said that if she hadn’t been, it was very unlikely she’d have survived the pregnancy. As it was, she was able to raise him until he was ten, teach him to control his speed so he didn’t shake his bones apart, teach him to control his strength so he didn’t break anything he didn’t mean to break. 

She stopped helping him because she died—or, in the parlance of the Initiative, she “fell”—and that was all Liam was told.

His father, who had come to live at the Initiative with Liam and his mother, faded away slowly. He was tall and he was thin and one day he was just gone, and there was Liam and the girl in his head and Simon.

Simon was…not like a second father, exactly, but he was _there_ and he would pat Liam’s head and tell him how well he was progressing and sometimes, when he had time between all his very important meetings, he would ask about Liam’s Dream.

Liam loved talking about his dream. He loved describing the curly-haired girl with the dark eyes, the way she laughed and the faces she made. He loved the feeling he would get when he knew she was his, and he was hers, and one day they would be _them_ , a perfect set, the way his mother and father had been.

When he’s thirteen Simon introduces him to Lou Teasdale and his training begins in earnest. Lou is the only other speed-based Gifted they had. She and her Dream, Tom, both stayed at the Institute, bringing Gifted kids in and training them. She is small and blond and funny and she is very, very fast.

They were there, Lou tells him, to save people. That was it. The means by which he saved people was totally up to him, so long as he did. That was the responsibility passed to him by his mother, and that was the only thing required of him if he wanted to keep living with the Initiative once he came of age. He didn’t have to, of course, although she told him that if he didn’t they would be keeping tabs on him anyway so that they would know where he was and what he was protecting.

This made sense to him. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t know where else he could possibly go.

Once, he asks Lou what happened to his mother. She looks at him for a long, long moment, blond hair tied up behind her head and eyes a little bit sad. It’s just before a sparring session and Liam is tired and doesn’t want to be here and is really just looking for something to talk about so he doesn’t have to try, again and again and again, to dodge her.

“She fell,” Lou says, and Liam sighs, disappointed. Lou’s still looking at him, though, and then she says, “catch me and I’ll tell you more.”

Liam bites his lip, firms his stance, and tries.

He tries for three years. He gets fast enough to race the trains that slide through the station, a few miles from the Initiative walls. He gets fast enough to cross London in less than a minute. He gets fast enough to catch birds out of the air, matching their speed so as not to hurt them. Fast, of course, has never really been Liam’s problem. He is fast and he is slow and he is nothing in between.

**

He’s fifteen and he brushes the tips of Lou Teasdale’s fingertips and then she’s gone. Again.

He’s faster than the train, now, but it’s relaxing to run alongside them anyway, and he’s frustrated with himself, frustrated with the silence and the sobriety of the Institute, frustrated with the Dreams running repeat in his head. He wants something new and he wants to do something stupid. He wants to run off and find her, but he knows Lou would catch him up and cradle him like he’s six years old and say, _not yet, you’re not ready._

 _Why not?_ He’d ask like he always does, _I’m ready to protect her, I know I am._

 _But she’s not ready to protect you,_ Lou would say in Simon’s voice, and that would be the end of that.

So he runs with the trains and lets speed take away his thoughts.

“You’re pretty fast,” says a voice, barely audible over the rush of the train and the wind in Liam’s ears and he focuses like he’s been taught to and glances to his left.

There’s a boy sitting on top of the train, cross-legged and far too comfortable, even with the wind whipping his hair around his face. He’s watching Liam with sharp, laughing eyes, no shock, no fear, just sort of curious. 

“Are you Gifted?” Liam asks, pitching his voice to cut through the wind, pacing it for normal-speed ears. 

The boy laughs. “Blunt, I like it.” He nods. “That’s what Simon said. Me and Zayn here both—“ he jerks a thumb to the air at his right, and then blinks. “Shit, hold up, forgot to grab him.”

Suddenly he’s gone, and then he’s back, and Liam’s eyes widen. There’d been no motion blur as he sped up or slowed back down. Either this kid is the fastest speedster he’s ever seen, or there’s something else going on. He wants to ask, but the second boy, who appeared alongside the first when he came back, is talking. “—out time,” he says, pulling a face at the first boy. “I was wondering when you were going to notice.”

The first boy laughs at him. They’re holding hands, fingers laced together tight. “I would’ve noticed in a minute anyway, but I went to talk to you and you weren’t there! C’mon Zaynie, show the Flash what you can do.”

 _The Flash._ “You read comic books?” Liam blurts, forgetting to pitch his voice right because here were two boys his own age, Gifted boys, and they read comics. The words are swept away in the wind, which is probably okay because they’re pretty embarrassing. The train starts to slow, and he slows with it, but his heart continues to beat too fast.

The second boy is staring at him, all soft edges and dark, dark eyes. His hair is somehow not awful, despite the wind. “I can’t,” he says, and it takes Liam a minute to realize he’s responding to the first boy. “I’d be swept away.”

The first boy pouts. “Fine,” he says, and then, “Hey, Flash, meet us at the station, we’re coming in now and I don’t wanna get caught up here.”

Liam nods, a bit overwhelmed, and then both of them are gone. The station. They’re coming to the Institute. He slows with an effort until he’s just walking along the tracks, bounds up the steps of the station like a normal boy meeting his friends.

Tom is standing and waiting on the platform, looking very official, though his tattoos peek out from his white shirt at his wrists. He looks surprised but not unpleased to see Liam. “Good,” he says when Liam jogs up to him. “This saves me the task of finding you and introducing you once we’re back.”

“He’s already been introduced,” says the first boy, stepping off the train. He’s fixed his hair – it’s a fashionable swoop over one eye, now, no indication that it was ever anything else. “Well, not technically, but we’ve spoken.” He holds out a hand for Liam to shake. “Louis,” he says. “Tomlinson. The Tommo.” He winks at Liam.

Liam shakes his hand. “This is Zayn,” Louis continues, indicating the boy who followed him off the train. They aren’t holding hands anymore but they look like they want to be. It makes Liam feel terribly alone. He holds out a hand, and Zayn takes it, still watching him. 

“Hi,” says Liam. “I’m Liam.” Zayn smiles at him, bright and sincere and Liam’s weirdly grateful for it.

“I’m Tom,” says Tom, shoving his hands in his pockets. Liam really likes Tom, because Tom doesn’t seem to care about rules or official business and he’s very good at just going with things as they happen. He seems perfectly willing to do that now, regarding the three of them with a kind of confused amusement.

“Well,” says Louis. “Shall we?” He gestures Tom on, like he’s a prince and Tom simply his guide.

Liam laughs at him, startled, and without knowing it crosses the line into the second era of his existence. 

Training with Zayn and Louis is completely different from training by himself. By himself he has nothing to think about _but_ himself. He isn’t fast enough, or strong enough, his control isn’t good enough. Training is about training.

With three of them, training somehow becomes about, like. What the training was actually for. One of the first things he learns is that Louis never does anything without asking about it. Every time Lou fills them in on what they’re doing for the day, Louis cocks his head and asks, “why?”

At first Liam thought he was doing it to be difficult, but Lou never reacted to him like he was ignoring her. She always took him seriously, answering at great length about the proper way to survive in a burning building, how to disarm someone without hurting them, what to do if someone has a gun to your head.

(“That’s easy”, Louis laughs, “I blink out.” 

“Right,” says Lou, “but where do you go? Do you just leave the other people in the situation to be shot?”

“Of course not.” Louis thinks a moment. “I pop behind him and get the gun away from him.”

“Something you learned last week, yes,” Lou acknowledges. “But what if there’s more than one?”

Louis shifts from foot to foot. “I still have the element of surprise,” he says, slowly. “They won’t be expecting teleportation.”

“And if they’ve done their homework?” Lou asks archly. “If they know who you are, what you can do?”

Louis falls silent, and nods, and they begin.)

Sometimes, before Lou can answer, Zayn does. He always starts up slow, but then outlines the situation succinctly and aptly. Lou nods at him and Louis grins at him proudly and says, “Thanks, Zayn.”

The three of them become inseparable. Mostly because Louis and Zayn were already inseparable, and Louis decides at some point that he and Liam are also inseparable, and he really means _inseparable_. He’s all over Liam immediately, slinging an arm around his shoulders or hugging him from behind whenever they hang out and like. The thing about Louis is that Liam can get away from him, can slide away and then be sprinting and there’s no way Liam can catch up, but if Louis can still see him it’s easy enough for him to just pop over and cling again and eventually Liam figures it’s easiest to just. Go with it.

It’s weird at first. Everything about Louis is weird at first. He’s seventeen and he’s loud and he’s happy and he’s _sexual_ in a way that fifteen-year-old Liam doesn’t quite understand. He’s not stupid. He knows what sex is. But he doesn’t _dream_ of sex, not the way that he discovers Louis and Zayn do. He dreams of kissing her and wiping her tears and sometimes his dreams turn darker, but he doesn’t dream of the wet heat and grasping hands that they do, that they tell him about at night when they’re all huddled together, hands clasped in hands, a stolen bottle of Tom’s wine between Louis’ knees.

And when Louis gets up, a little bit of a drunken sway to his step, and stands over Zayn, expectant, Liam doesn’t know what to do. “I’m off to bed,” he announces, and offers Zayn a hand up. “You coming?” he asks, all confidence and swaying hips.

Liam watches Zayn lick his lips, watches how his eyes flicker over Louis’ body, familiar and appraising, and he doesn’t understand.

It’s not the first time but it is the most blatant. He catches them, sometimes, squirreled away in corners of the Institute, Louis’ hands cupping Zayn’s face and their lips pink and slick, but Louis always lets go with a smirk and Zayn always ends up watching Liam sideways, just waiting.

It makes Liam’s stomach feel like it’s sticking to his ribs, makes his palms sweat.

This time, Zayn coughs a little. “In a bit, Lou?” he says, squinting, and Louis’ eyebrows fly up. Zayn smiles a little, apologetic, and then says, “I want to talk to Li about something.”

Understanding dawns on Louis’ face, and he look to Liam, who’s sitting on the floor with one hand around the neck of the wine bottle and no idea what’s happening. He feels a little sick, from the alcohol or from all the stares he doesn’t understand, and then Louis nods, shortly, and crouches to kiss Zayn on the mouth. “I won’t wait up,” he says against Zayn’s lips. “But I expect you to make up for it in the morning.”

Zayn’s smiling when he pulls away, a sweet fond smile that makes Liam want to crush the glass of the bottle in his fist. He could, he thinks muzzily. It’d be easy.

When it’s just the two of them Zayn shifts so he’s facing him. “Are you okay?” he asks softly.

Liam hesitates, because there’s no reason for him not to be okay. But he’s never been a very good liar and he really _likes_ talking to Zayn, likes the way he waits to hear what Liam actually has to say. It’s different from any of the adults. Talking to Louis is good, too, but it’s also different, more disjointed, he makes jokes and pushes and pushes until you’re totally honest and Liam doesn’t have any idea where he would go if he were pushed, right now.

“No,” he says.

Zayn nods and reaches out a hand. Liam offers him the wine bottle but he grabs Liam’s hand instead, laces their fingers together tight, and suddenly Liam feels like crying, is crying, can’t _stop_ crying.

He can’t stop thinking about Zayn and Louis on the train, their hands clasped, can’t stop thinking about the easy way Louis touches, touches Zayn, touches him, can’t stop thinking about the first time Louis hugged him and what it felt like to just be held.

“My mother’s dead,” he chokes out, “and no one will tell me why.”

Zayn pulls him in, a hand on the back of his neck, and he fists his hands in his shirt and sobs. 

He doesn’t cry often. It’s not that anyone’s really told him not to, it’s just that whenever he did Simon would sigh and have one of the others take him home, and so he just…stopped doing it. But now he’s drunk and Zayn’s fingers are in his hair and he’s making little soothing noises and Liam clings to him hard. 

He tells Zayn about his mother, and the way she taught him to quell the beating of his own heart, because it used to be too fast, humming-bird fast. He presses his palm flat to Zayn’s chest and sings the song she used to sing, just nonsense syllables to the slow one-two of a heartbeat. He fucks up the rhythm a little because he’s still crying, but Zan doesn’t seem to mind, Zayn just runs his palms up and down Liam’s back and stays quiet.

He mutters about his father into Zayn’s collar, once he’s done with tears. He misses his father but it’s distant and pale and fading like his father himself, and it doesn’t make him want to crush the world beneath his feet.

“Why won’t anyone tell you anything?” Zayn asks, when Liam’s pulled back, when he’s swiped a hand across his eyes and taken several huge, shaking breaths.

Liam shakes his head. “That’s how it works,” he says simply, because it is. “And. Lou says she’ll tell me if I can catch her.”

Zayn’s brows draw together. “What?” he asks.

“If I can catch her, she’ll tell me what happened to my mum,” Liam explains, confused that Zayn didn’t get it the first time. It’s not a particularly difficult concept, and Zayn’s the smartest of them.

“That’s awful,” Zayn says. “God, that’s so terrible.”

Liam blinks at him. “Why?”

Zayn’s whole face firms up into something angry and determined. “We’ll fix this, Li,” he says. “Me and Louis, we’ll fix it.”

Liam just shrugs, wants to say _you already have_ , wants to curl back into Zayn’s chest and go to sleep, but Zayn’s standing and he’s pulling Liam up, too, by their hands where they’re still joined. Liam scrambles to his feet, still confused but settled, now, like something that had been trying to claw its way out of him had finally pushed free.

Zayn cups his cheek in a warm palm. “Go to sleep, Liam,” he says, something soft and unexpected in his voice. 

The next day Louis is, like, especially weird. His constant touches aren’t as teasing and he keeps squeezing Liam’s shoulder when he passes him by and his eyes are more serious than Liam’s ever seen them. Zayn, for his part, stays pretty quiet, but there’s an expectant kind of energy to him. 

Louis speaks up before training as usual. He crosses his arms and stares hard at Lou, who raises her eyebrows, expecting the constant “why?”

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” Louis asks, voice like stone, and both Lou and Liam turn to stare at him.

“Excuse me?” Lou asks.

“A little bird told me you made a _bet_ with Liam,” Louis continues, and he sounds _furious_ , he sounds absolutely murderous, and Liam shivers, “and I want to know what the hell a grown woman like you is doing toying with his goddamn heart. You can’t make information about his mother some kind of fucking _prize_ , that’s sick! He has a right to know!”

Lou stops what she’s doing, putting down the cones and caution tape she’s been using to set up what looked like some kind of obstacle course. “I think you’ll find,” she says slowly, almost sadly, “That we decide what Liam has a right to know.”

“That’s not fair,” Zayn says suddenly from where he’s standing a little behind Louis.

Lou stares at him for a long moment. “Perhaps not.” She looks at Liam. “The bet still stands,” she says, and then she’s gone, a blur of motion away towards the storage sheds.

Liam sees Louis blink out and Zayn push himself like a rocket into the sky and then he’s running too fast and too hard to see anything else.

He can’t see Lou anymore but he can hear her, the slap of her shoes on the ground, too fast to be anything else, really just a thin distant hum, and he follows that, chases her around the sheds, vaults over the low fence into the residential section of the Institute. He follows her, he’s gaining on her, he slips around the corner into the parking lot and—

And Louis has her pinned, his arms around her shoulders in a move Liam knows for sure she taught him, knows for double-sure that she can break out of it, but for whatever reason she isn’t.

“Go on,” Louis says, grinning, “tag her.”

“But that’s cheating,” Liam breathes.

“No,” says Louis fiercely, “that’s teamwork.”

Lou bristles but nods, and so Liam approaches, feeling off-balance and cheated and kind of angry, and slaps her palm with his. “Got you,” he mutters.

Louis lets her go with a triumphant grin, and she brushes herself off, watching Liam’s face. “Meeting with Simon tonight,” she says shortly. “Be there.”

Behind her, Zayn settles softly to the pavement and high-fives Louis, who murmurs something about eyes in the sky, and Liam wants to. To. He clenches his fists and feels more useless than he ever has in his life.

Louis finally notices his face and is halfway through saying “Hey, what’s wrong?” before Liam is running again, not anywhere in particular, just. Away.

It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate it, appreciate what they must have thought was help, but. But that Louis could slip into his life, so perfectly grown into his own skin and his own heart, and do in _the first try_ what Liam has been trying to do for three years, it. It fills Liam up until there’s jealousy and anger and useless resentment in every pore.

Louis finds him an hour before the meeting, slipping into Liam’s room and just watching him in the mirror.

“I didn’t need your help,” Liam snaps.

Louis settles on his bed. “I know,” he says. “But I couldn’t let it be. I’m sorry.”

It’s soft and it’s unexpected and it’s so antithetical to everything that Louis is that Liam spins to stare at him, all his anger slipping out of him, to make sure he’s not been replaced by someone else. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” says Louis again, and pats the bed beside him. “You don’t need me to fight your battles for you. But you have to know why I did it.”

Liam approaches him cautiously, perches on the edge of the bed. Louis chuckles at him a little. “You’re really not used to it, are you? The whole touching thing.”

Liam shakes his head, feeling himself go a little red. “I don’t mind, though, really,” he says, because he doesn’t.

Louis grins at him and takes the hint, shuffles closer so his knees are up against Liam’s side. “Stockholm Syndrome right there,” he says, and then freezes. “Sorry, that. That wasn’t funny.”

Liam thought it’d been pretty funny, privately, but he thinks everything Louis does is funny. He turns to face him, trying to meet Louis at this new, quiet level. 

Louis looks at him for a long moment, reaches over to brush Liam’s curls out of his eyes. “When Zayn told me what Lou was doing to you I wanted to kill her,” he says, a cooler version of his earlier fury evident in his voice. “It was bad enough all the other shit they put you through but—fuck, Li, I don’t know how you survived this place so long.”

“It’s not so bad,” Liam protests, because the Institute might be grueling but it’s still home.

Louis’ hand lingers at his jaw, and he levels a look at him. “Have you ever even been to London?”

Liam scoffs at him. “Of course I have!” He lifts his head, a little proud. “I can cross London in 45 seconds.”

Louis doesn’t laugh, though. The corners of his mouth turn down, instead, and Liam kind of hates that expression, hates that Louis ever be anything but sunshine-happy. “Have you ever been inside a _building_ in London?” Louis asks, his hand resuming its slow trace down Liam’s throat.

“Oh,” says Liam, and drops his eyes. He thinks about it, but he doesn’t have to think very hard. “No,” he says, “I’m supposed to come back as soon as I’ve run it.”

“Yeah,” says Louis. “ _Fuck_ this place. Zayn and I are getting out as soon as we possibly can.”

It’s like the times that Liam’s too distracted to dodge Lou’s punches at all, the times that they slam into his ribs at full strength, and for a minute he has trouble breathing. Louis must see it in his face, because he takes a sharp breath. “You too!” he says hurriedly. “Fuck, Li, _obviously_ you too, you don’t think after today we’d _leave_ you here?”

Liam shrugs, still feeling a little bruised. “Why would you take me? The two of you are so.” He stares at his hands and figures, so long as it’s honesty hour with Louis, he should say. “For a while I thought. Somehow. You were each others’ Dreams.”

Louis stares at him and then laughs, loud and startled. “How could we be?” He asks, wrinkling his nose. “We’re both Gifted.”

“I know,” says Liam. “It’s dumb, I just. You’re so. A-and you have sex.”

“You know you _can_ have sex with other people than your fated destined magic partner husband wife,” Louis says, chucking him under the chin.

“Shut up,” says Liam, blushing.

“In fact, you don’t even have sex with yours, right?” Louis says. “Not according to your dreams.” He narrows his eyes, thinking. “Maybe she’s a lesbian, like that new girl they’re training with Zayn.”

Liam wants to say _what new girl_ and he wants to say _Danielle’s not a lesbian_ , but Louis has already moved on. “Zayn and I are not fated or whatever,” he says, “not in the way the Institute defines it, anyway, but…” his face gets serious, and he captures Liam’s chin between his fingers. “We love each other. A lot. And we love _you_ , Li.” He bites his lip. “That’s why I did what I did, why I couldn’t let her torment her anymore.”

Liam stares at him, heart pounding, has no words for the bigness of his heart in his chest.

“I love you,” Louis says, smiling a little, “and it occurred to me today that you might not actually know that, which is stupid. So there it is, I-I said it.”

Liam opens his mouth, throat working, but he can’t, he can’t make the words come, it’s like there’s a screaming in the back of his head.

“I don’t expect you to say it back,” Louis says, and his hands are gentle on Liam’s chest. “God knows this place has fucked you, up, down, and sideways. But I think,” he takes a breath. “I think you mean it, don’t you, even if you can’t say it yet.”

Liam nods, eyes burning, and catches Louis’ hands in his. “I do,” he says, throat a little tight. There’s a perfect, incredible joy to saying even that, and Liam can’t remember being this happy, ever. “I do mean it.”

Louis lets out a breath like somehow, absurdly, _he’d_ been nervous, and then smiles, bright and Louis again. “Good,” he says. He leans in and brushes a kiss over Liam’s forehead. “Now go squeeze some truth from The Man.”

**

Liam’s seventeen and he wants nothing more than to forget that the last year of his life ever happened. He’s seventeen and half of his heart is missing. He’s seventeen and he can’t sleep without waking up screaming.

He’s seventeen and there’s a building burning down around him and he’s seriously considering not getting out of the way. It wouldn’t kill him, is the problem. He wonders if morphine would make the dreams better or worse.

He takes a single smoky breath and then there are arms around him and he’s outside, and Louis is muttering fiercely into his shirt, “don’t you dare.”

There are people coughing all around them, chattering and staring at the blaze, and a few of them are staring at the two of them, too. More of them are staring at Zayn, where he’s settling down on the pavement, a child in each arm. 

Liam shrugs Louis off him, and Louis lets go, his face a mixture of concern and frustration. Liam remembers a time when Louis would have clung to him, laughing, but this isn’t that Louis and. More importantly, he’s not that Liam.  
“C’mon,” Louis says softly, and he takes Liam’s hand. “We’re getting you drunk.”

Liam laces their fingers together and pretends it’s just so Louis can jump with him more easily.

Drinking was a good idea. Drinking was a good idea until Louis starts talking about how he knows his Dream is in Paris and how he’s going to go at the end of the month and sweep him off his feet, and then drinking is a very bad idea because he suddenly wants to break his beer bottle over Louis’ head.

It’s not Louis’ fault, really, it’s just that Louis has always reacted to someone being upset with something he’s doing by continuing to do it until the other person is immune. Liam’s immune to a lot of things because of Louis, and he’s honestly and truly grateful, but. This one is going to take a long fucking time.

He excuses himself from the bar, leaving Louis gesturing to himself and the pretty bartender, because Zayn had already gone out for a smoke, and maybe that was the problem, maybe the problem was he didn’t have that silent buffer of Zayn between them, nodded and agreeing and grinning at all Louis’ jokes, and he wonders when Louis became so altogether _too much_ for him.

(He doesn’t wonder long. The answer is the same as the answer to any question he asks himself anymore. Or maybe the answer is that Louis has always been too much, and Liam’s been trying to drink him in anyway.)

He steps outside and Zayn’s nowhere to be found, unsurprisingly. He likes smoking from as high a vantage point as possible, and anyway, Liam wasn’t really looking for him, just for. Space. He leans against the wall and tries to remember how to breathe without wanting to stop.

Zayn alights beside him after maybe ten minutes. He’s tipsy – there’s a slight wobble to his flight pattern that makes the corner of Liam’s mouth turn up despite himself. “Hey, you,” he greets, fond.

“Hey,” says Zayn, smiling back at him. “Lou get going about Harry again?”

“I’m excited for him, I really am,” Liam says, because he is, somewhere, with whatever lost part of him is capable of being excited. “I want that for him. I want it for you, too.”

“I know,” says Zayn. He steps up to Liam, slides a hand to his jaw and turns his face up to the streetlight like he’s examining him for bruises. He’s hovering a little above the ground so he can look at Liam from above, and Liam laughs a little at that.

“Miss that,” Zayn says shortly. “Your laugh lines are getting too shallow.”

“Are you calling me old?” Liam asks, and Zayn’s face is very close, very intent. He’s reminded, wildly, strangely, of the way Zayn used to look at him after he found him and Louis kissing in the hallways. Slick-mouthed. Like he was waiting, seeing what Liam would do.

“Nah,” says Zayn. “You look good, just. Different.”

Liam wants to ask what he means, wants to, to tell him how much he wishes he didn’t, how much he wants to be the kid that they loved, not this. Cynical impossible _thing_ that had come back to them, but Zayn’s kissing him, so he can’t do any of that, can’t do anything but kiss back. 

Zayn chuckles, a little darkly, and kisses harder.

“Why did you do that?” Liam mutters against his mouth, wonders if Zayn can taste his heart where it sits in his throat and beats beats beats.

“Because I wanted to,” Zayn says, and his hands come up, burying themselves in Liam’s curls. “Because you’re beautiful.”

“I, I’m not—“ Liam stutters, “Zayn, I’m not your.” He can’t even say it, and the wave of self-loathing that causes is overwhelming.

“I know,” says Zayn, and his teeth graze Liam’s lower lip, jerking him back into his skin, dizzying. “I don’t care.”

Liam lets his eyes slip closed, lets his hands find Zayn’s hips, and tries to believe him.

The first time they sleep together he thinks maybe everyone was wrong. Maybe Simon and his mother and Lou and who ever told him how perfect he would feel with Danielle had just been following some script, because if there’s a feeling more perfect than this, than flesh on flesh and heart pressed to beating heart, he can’t imagine what it is.

But when he slips into sleep she’s waiting for him, and he wakes up tear-stained and Zayn wakes up singing, and that’s it, isn’t it, that’s how it’s going to be.

It’s still. It’s still _good_ , it’s him and Zayn and it’s new and he really does love Zayn, even tells him so, but Zayn’s. Zayn’s seventeen the way people should be seventeen, and Liam. Isn’t.

They rent a flat above a bar, which is nice because it means Liam can get drunk whenever he wants, and is also nice because living with Zayn is nice, really nice, nicer than anything has a right to be. He makes Liam feel lighter and occasionally, lost in his arms, Liam manages to forget.

He’s eighteen and he thinks he might be in love with all of his heart that’s still beating.

“Fuck fate, anyway,” says Zayn, and pulls Liam into his side with his free hand, burying it in his curls. They’re on the roof above their flat and Zayn is smoking and the night is quiet, and Liam lets his eyes slip closed, almost lets himself believe Zayn actually means it.

Almost. “Don’t say that,” he says tiredly.

Zayn’s fingers tighten in his hair. “I mean it,” he says with quiet intensity. “Fuck fate, fuck Dreams, fuck whoever decided you deserve this.” He takes a breath and says, a little shaky, “fuck whoever says we’re not allowed to be real.”

Liam shakes his head, sorrow making his throat tighten. “We’re allowed to be real,” he says softly. “We’re just not allowed to be forever.”

Zayn’s silent for a long time, and Liam opens his eyes, watching his face as he stares down at the street below, watches the smoke leave his lips and dissipate into the night. “What if I want you forever?” Zayn says suddenly, his eyes snapping to Liam’s, and Liam wants to cry and scream and punch him through a wall and kiss him all at once.

He settles for doing the last, bringing their mouths together hard, but when Zayn reaches for him with a small needy noise he jerks away. “Go to sleep, Zayn.”

He leaves, that night, and it’s not exactly fair to say that he doesn’t look back. He does look back. But he never _goes_ back, and for Liam, whose thought-to-action time is faster than most people’s thought-at-all speed, that’s just as good.

**

He’s nineteen and he’s filled with a wild, panicked, all-consuming _hope_.

He’s running faster than he’s ever run before, Simon’s words ringing in his head, all clipped, careful accent. _We don’t have much time._

He knows where Zayn lives, because of all things he sent him a goddamn _Christmas card_ , seized by some weird need to keep in contact without actually keeping in contact. It’s not hard to find – big, penthouse flat, lots of windows. He forces himself to knock on the door, forces himself to breathe normally, stand normally.

Harry opens the door, and he’d be surprised by that but he doesn’t have room for it in his head. _We don’t have much time._

He pushes past Harry and into the room, his eyes seeking Zayn out where he’s curled on the couch with a sweet-faced Irish boy that Liam recognizes with a sickening jolt, though he’s never seen him before. He has room for a single pang of jealousy or regret or guilt or _something_ , and then his mouth is moving, he can’t stop his mouth from moving.

“I need your help,” he says. “Please.”

_We think we can bring her back._


	6. Chapter 6

Niall stares at the stranger--Liam, Harry had said, and his brain fills in in simultaneous Perrie-and-Harry voices, _someone we used to work with Zayn's ex-boyfriend._ He's tall and broad-shouldered and looks like he might be in the military, the kind of guy they'd pick for all the recruitment ads because of his pretty face.

Zayn unfolds from around Niall and stands, all the giddy happiness from a moment before draining from his face, replaced by...something else, confusion and shock and a little bit of relief.

"You're okay," he says. "Where've you been? What's going on?"

Liam shrugs, and it reminds Niall of someone having a seizure - too much movement in not enough time.

"Doesn't matter," he says. "You and Perrie are coming with me." His eyes flicker to Harry, who's come around the back of the couch. "Lou, too. Now."

Zayn glances at Harry, then at Niall, who does his best to say _don't, please_ with his eyes. It’s selfish, maybe, but the idea of Zayn leaving now with this guy makes him feel cold and anxious, which isn’t...fair, really, it’s not like Liam’s done anything to him, but something about him feels really off. Zayn closes his eyes for a moment and turns back to Liam. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me why."

Liam's jaw tightens. "No time," he says. "Just. I, I have a chance, Zayn, to undo it, all of it, to get her back, and I need you with me."

"Get her back?" Zayn says, and Niall pulls his legs into his chest and feels very much like he’s intruding. “Danielle?”

Liam winces and nods in the same instant, and looks like he wants to cry. He reminds Niall of his mum’s old dog, mad before the end, all shivering bones and huge, pleading eyes and a distinct sense of violence, of danger.

“Zayn,” he says, “I don’t. I don’t think he’s okay.” He wants to say _this isn’t right_ but how would he know, he doesn’t know what is right for these people, they’re superheroes, this could be totally normal.

Zayn leans over to pull Niall against his hip, an instinctive, protective motion that warms Niall from the inside out and makes Liam really look at him for the first time. He stares, and Niall resists the urge to shiver.

“Liam,” Zayn says slowly, “who told you this?”

“I said it doesn’t matter!” Liam snaps. “Can you just fucking trust me, Zayn?” His eyes are desperate. “Don’t you trust me?”

“I do trust you,” Zayn says seriously, “I trust you with my life, and you know that. But I can’t tell how much of you is you, right now, and how much of you is Simon, and I wouldn’t trust that man with anything.”

“So what?” Liam says, starting to pace. “So just because you don’t trust Simon you’re not even going to think about coming with me? So just because you don’t trust him you’re going to screw me out of my chance to bring back my goddamn _Dream_ , Zayn, my Dream, you’re going to sit there with yours all fucking cuddled into your side and tell me that you can’t fucking risk following Simon’s advice, just _once_?”

“He’s a fucking telepath!” Zayn snaps, finally raising his voice, and Niall lets go of him, drawing back into the couch. This is not exactly how he expected this night to go. This is about as far away from how he expected any night to go in his entire life as you could get, actually, beginning with the coffee shop gig and including the gay kisses and the flying and ending up here, watching two superheroes have a very emotionally charged conversation about things he doesn’t even remotely understand.

Maybe he should leave. This isn’t his world. Zayn, Zayn by himself, he can handle (well, no, he can’t, because everything about Zayn is overwhelming, but it’s a totally different overwhelming than this, an overwhelming he wants very very very much to experience more and with as much frequency as possible). Maybe he should just go and leave them to this and check with Zayn in the morning, make sure everything’s okay.

He bites his lip and sits on his hands and waits for a moment to interrupt, to explain that he has class in the morning, that he should really be getting back.

Zayn’s still talking. “He’s a fucking incredibly powerful telepath and he’s a manipulative asshole and he’s had you under his thumb for your whole goddamn life. It’s not as simple as not following his advice, he’s in your head, Li, and you can’t even tell because he’s always fucking been there.”

He takes a step towards Liam. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I really am, but I’m not going anywhere until I know more about the situation, and neither should you.”

“You don’t understand,” Liam says, “you can’t understand.” He’s pacing in tight circles, doubling back on himself, his chest rising and falling unnaturally fast, and he spins to stare Zayn in the face. “ _Please._ ”

Zayn shakes his head. “Perrie did a little bit of digging. He’s planning something, Li, and it’s big, and for all we know you’re the first step.”

“I don’t care,” Liam spits. “I don’t care, I don’t _care_.” He steps closer to Zayn, seems to slow himself down with an effort. “This is something you can’t understand, and I need you to trust me, no matter what else is going on. I need you with me, Zayn.”

Harry leans down and puts his hand on Niall’s shoulder, squeezing it, comforting and settling. Niall had totally forgotten he was there. He can’t take his eyes off of Liam and Zayn where they’re standing, almost toe to toe, just...staring. There’s a look on Zayn’s face, something sad and awful that Niall never ever ever wants to see again, and suddenly he knows he _can’t_ leave, it’s important that he be here, this is what he’s _for_. All the purposelessness of the last few weeks, all the uselessness and powerlessness, suddenly crystallize into something certain. 

Suddenly he knows, in some way entirely outside of himself, that without him here Zayn would already be gone.

“Zayn,” he says, to anchor him or make him smile or just make him stop looking like that, and both Zayn and Liam turn to look at him. Niall wants to say something else, back Zayn up or, or something, but Liam _blurs_.

Niall’s lifted bodily up off the couch, away from Harry, and slammed into the opposite wall. Something--bone, wood-panelling, Niall’s too dazed to know--cracks. There’s a hand at his throat, holding him up, the only thing he’s really aware of through the dark and the pain.

“Haven’t you always wondered, Lou?” Liam’s saying, somewhere very very far away, and like, too fast, somehow, garbled. Niall can feel his nails digging into the sides of his throat and he wonders how long it’ll be until he passes out. Getting his eyes open is a struggle, but he does it, because it’s very important that he be able to see Zayn, who is standing more still than Niall has ever seen anyone stand. His fists clenched at his sides. Niall can’t really focus properly enough to see his face but it’s like he can feel his fear, his jackhammer heart. He wants to tell him it’s going to be okay, but every time he moves his lips his throat aches and Liam swallows and doesn’t tighten his grip, exactly, but shifts it so quickly it hurts and everything flickers wildly. He’s talking again: “Could you get here in time, do you think? Could you blink here faster than I could crush his throat?”

Zayn lets out a noise somewhere between a sob and a growl and Niall has never needed to touch another person so badly in his whole life. He has also never needed to breathe so badly in his whole life. He still can, shallowly through his nose, but he can feel his hands going numb, little tingles at the tips of his fingers.

“No,” says a voice that must be Louis, and Niall didn’t even notice him get here, can’t look away from Zayn to see where he even is. He sounds distressingly calm, maybe, or maybe that’s just how he always sounds, because Niall doesn’t even really know him, doesn’t know any of them, and that’s what makes him finally panic, not the super-fast, super-strong fingers around his throat but the fact that he doesn’t know _any of these people_ and he might very well be about to die. His life is in the hands of complete strangers, even if one of those complete strangers is his, somehow, truly and inexplicably. He’s going to die surrounded entirely by things he doesn’t understand.

He swallows hard and tries not to hyperventilate.

“I wouldn’t be able to get there in time,” Louis continues, “but I don’t need to. You’re not going to kill him, Li.”

“How do you know?” Liam asks, still too fast. “I’ve done it before, it wouldn’t take much, and then you, you’d _have_ to help me. You’d understand.” He looks at Zayn. “She could bring him back, if we leave now. She could bring both of them back.”

Zayn doesn’t even looks like he’s breathing.

Louis takes a step forward. “We will help you,” he says. “You just have to slow down.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Liam spits, and his fingers tighten minutely around Niall’s throat. The world goes gray. Whatever he says next is lost in the rushing of the wind in Niall’s ears and the red-black pounding on his eyelids.

The next thing he knows he’s on the floor, slumped against the wall, his whole body throbbing with the blood in his veins. Zayn’s hands are on his jaw, so gentle he can barely feel them. “Niall,” he’s saying, low and desperate, “Niall, please, wake up—“ He has really beautiful eyelashes, really beautiful _wet_ eyelashes, and that isn’t, isn’t right.

“Hey,” Niall says, or tries to, but it catches in his throat and he ends up coughing and then he can’t stop coughing, deep, painful coughs that make him feel like he’s shaking apart from the inside. He coughs so much he drools all over Zayn’s hands and oh, great, that’s attractive, and he wants to apologize but he can’t get his throat to form the right shapes, can’t do anything but curl his tingling fingers into Zayn’s chest in a weak attempt to push him away or pull him close or.

Zayn solves his problem by picking him up bodily, and that helps, he can shove his face into Zayn’s neck and try to breathe without feeling like he’s tearing his throat into pieces with every breath. “Hospital,” Zayn says, short and desperate, whether to him or to everyone else Niall doesn’t know. As he’s carried away he looks back over Zayn’s shoulder, taking in the scene with delirious eyes.

Harry is sitting on the couch, his head in his hands, but Liam is standing, still, his shoulders shaking, and Louis is right in his space, looking up at his face intently. His lips are moving and as Zayn and Niall sail through the window Niall realizes he’s _singing_ —slow nonsense words to a one-two beat, his palm pressed flat to Liam’s heart.

Either it takes less than a minute for Zayn to get to the hospital from his flat or Niall passes out for part of it because the next thing he knows he’s being laid down on a stretcher and there are doctors everywhere and Zayn, Zayn’s talking intensely to a nurse.

“He was choked,” he says, his eyes on Niall, and the nurse raises her eyebrows. 

“I’m going to have to ask the circumstances of the injury,” she says, and Niall almost laughs but just ends up swallowing, dry and horrible. He really needs some water. He tries to say so, but there are hands on him, settling him, and then he’s being wheeled away from Zayn, and no, it’s _very important_ that he still be able to see Zayn.

Zayn seems to know, and pushes past the nurse to follow him.

“Sir,” says the nurse, more insistently, “unless you’re family I’m going to have to ask you to explain the circumstances of injury and then go.”

Zayn spins to her, a little wild. “No,” he says, “you aren’t.” He reaches in his pocket and flashes something—a badge? Do superheroes get badges?—and her eyes go wide and surprised.

“I, I’ll get my supervisor,” she stammers, but Zayn’s already turned back to Niall, darted forward to take his hand. 

_That’s the way to solve visitation rights_ , Niall thinks hysterically to himself, _just make one in every gay couple a superhero._ The urge to laugh is too much and he starts coughing again, twitching upwards painfully against the hands that hold him still. Zayn’s fingers squeeze his, and then everything goes dark.

In his dream, he and Zayn are flying over trees, dark pine woods that somehow feel _wrong_. It’s like the sensation Niall first felt when he put his feet down on nothing, only it’s crawling up his arms and legs, a creeping, almost oily pressure.

There’s a clearing below them and Zayn aims for it. His arms are relaxed around Niall but every time Niall looks at his face Zayn refuses to look back, just stares straight ahead.

Louis is waiting in the clearing, dressed in all black, a pale-faced shadow against the pines. “Ready?” he asks Zayn softly, and Niall wants to scream at him, wants to know why no one will look at him, but then Zayn sets him down and cups his cheeks and looks at him like no one ever has. He looks at him like he’s drinking him in, like he’s memorizing him, and when they kiss it’s slow and thorough and lingering.

_Thank you,_ says Zayn, and it takes Niall a moment to realize that he can’t possibly have said it aloud. Their mouths are still sealed together, but he hears it nonetheless. _Thank you, Niall._

Zayn pulls back and moves away, something hard and determined and desperately sad in his eyes, and Niall shakes his head. “No,” he says, and Zayn closes his eyes, turning to look upward, into the sky.

“No,” says Niall again, louder, and Louis steps up to him, reaches out a hand. Niall dodges him and leaps towards Zayn. “This isn’t a _fucking goodbye_ —”

Louis lays a hand on his shoulder and the forest blinks out, replaced by a small grey room lined in blinking consoles, and then Niall wakes up.

He’s in a hospital room, and everything is clean and smells faintly of orange and not at all like wet earth and pines. Zayn is sitting by his bedside. As soon as he sees Niall’s eyes open he’s on his feet, darting over and taking his hands. “Hey,” he says, “hey, you’re up.”

Niall nods. “You’re here,” he says, and it comes out rough and a little broken but he doesn’t cough, and that’s a victory.

Zayn leans down, traces soft fingers down his throat, and Niall tilts his head back to let him. It should maybe scare him, how easy it is to let Zayn in. He should maybe feel like everything is happening too fast, with them. He should maybe want to back off.

“Of course I’m here,” Zayn says softly, and Niall shakes off his dream and smiles wide.

Zayn doesn’t return it. “I’m sorry,” he says, his expression dark and complicated. “I’m so fucking sorry, Niall, I never. I never would have let him in if I’d known what he was going to do--”

“Not your fault,” Niall rasps, shaking his head.

“Of course it is,” Zayn argues. “That’s my job, you know? My most important job, and he almost.” Theres a tremble in his voice and Niall grabs his hand from where it’s resting on his chest, threads their fingers together. He wants to say something but he’s never been particularly good at words, so he says that.

“I’m not very good at this,” he says, with a little huff of laughter. “A few hours into it and you’re having a mental breakdown.”

Zayn blinks at him. “What?”

“I’ve got a job, too, remember?” Niall says. “You, you said I was for keeping you, like, emotionally balanced, and you don’t look particularly balanced to me.” He looks the opposite of balanced, in fact - his face is drawn and his eyes are still wild and he keeps moving his thumb across the back of Niall’s hand, jerkily, like he’s trying to be soothing but can’t quite manage it.

Zayn stares at him for a second and then laughs a little. “I guess we’ll be shit at this together, then.”

Niall grins at him. “Yeah.” He shifts. “What time is it?”

Zayn runs a hand through his hair. “Like five in the morning.”

“You didn’t sleep,” Niall accuses, taking in the circles under his eyes, and something else, a redness, a grit around them. “You’ve been crying?”

The corner of Zayn’s mouth turns up, a tiny, bitter expression. “Tonight was the night I was finally going to be able to sleep right again,” he says, and then goes a little red. “If. If you’d wanted to sleep with me.”

Niall doesn’t know if he means actual sleep or sex or some arcane superpowered bonding ritual but he feels blurry and surreal and he doesn’t much care. “I want to sleep with you.”

Zayn goes a little wide-eyed. “Oh.”

Niall smiles at him and closes his eyes, suddenly very tired, and Zayn is too far away. “C’mere,” he says, and tugs at Zayn’s hand.

Zayn makes a soft noise and then there’s weight settling in softly next to him. “I didn’t think you meant now,” Zayn jokes gently.

Niall opens his eyes to smirk at him. “Wouldn’t be able to give you the attention you deserve,” he says, and Zayn’s lips part, a little, in response, and his mouth is really very nice, Niall could probably stare at his mouth all day.

He kisses him, but stretching his neck out makes it ache dully so he curls downward instead, shoving his face into Zayn’s chest. “Wanna know you,” he says against the beating of Zayn’s heart.

“Hm?” Zayn asks, his hands tracing hesitant patterns over Niall’s back.

Niall moves back enough that he won’t be muffled when he repeats, “I wanna know you.” He flicks his eyes upward, meets Zayn’s. “You’re mine, yeah? That, that’s what this means, you’re mine and I’m yours, that's why it's not weird that I want you this close all the time.”

Zayn blinks slow at him. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s what it means.”

Niall nods, content with that. “Then I should know you, and I don’t, I don’t know anything about you.”

Zayn’s hands settle more surely on his back, his long fingers picking out places where Niall’s muscles are coiled tight and painful, pressing gently but insistently. “Alright,” he says, “um. Well, My name’s Zayn Malik, I’m from Bradford, I’m nineteen years old, I have a mother and one sister and I can fly.”

"Just flight, or are you invincible and super strong, too?" Niall asks.

"I'm stronger than a non-Gifted," Zayn says, "But not as strong as Liam or Perrie. Louis is like me. Perrie's strongest, and the only one of us who's invincible."

"She's not," corrects Niall, thrilled to actually know anything. "Just heals really fast." He smiles, eyes still closed. “Like Wolverine.”

Zayn laughs. “Like Wolverine.”

Niall sighs and wriggles a little, pushing back against Zayn’s massage. “Tell me about the first time you saved someone.”

Zayn presses a kiss to his hair and he’s pretty sure he’s never been this relaxed. There’s an itching, aching pressure in the back of his throat and Zayn’s arm is a little awkward under his head but he’s so _comfortable_ and he wants to sleep but he wants to hear Zayn’s voice more.

“Louis calls it my origin story,” Zayn says softly, and Niall can hear the smile in it, a perfect fond thing that works its way to his own lips, too. “It’s how we met. His little sister Charlotte did a flip over the handlebars of her bike, nearly ended up head-first in traffic.”

“But you caught her,” Niall says, weirdly proud.

“Yeah,” says Zayn. “Louis’ mum saw, and she was so happy she cried into my shirt.”

“Because you saved her little girl,” Niall teases, “you hero.”

“And because she’d finally found someone else like her son,” Zayn says. “I think she credited me with saving Louis as much as Charlotte.”

“How come?” Niall asks, frowning a little. “He wasn’t okay?”

“The neighborhood Louis grew up in... the kind of place it was, the kind of people he was surrounded by... you’re expected to fit certain molds. It’s a little hard to deal with constant dreams of green-eyed boys sucking your cock, and harder when you teleport randomly onto your kitchen table, or your roof, or the middle of your high school parking lot, in the middle of those dreams.” Zayn keeps his voice light, but Niall can feel the tension in him anyway. He slides a hand up his chest, comforting, and Zayn relaxes a little.

“It was easier for me,” he continues. “I’d been dreaming of you for so long that my interest in boys was just kind of assumed. I was probably the only boy ever that got to high school and had a heterosexuality crisis.”

“You like girls?” Niall asks, surprised. 

Zayn nods a little against his hair. “I like everyone, really. Not as much as Harry likes everyone, gayer than that. Thought I was totally gay for most of my life. Then Perrie came along and, well. We’re kind of each others’ exceptions.”

Niall snuggles closer, making a face against Zayn’s chest. “Knew it,” he says, “as soon as I saw you guys.” He yawns and remembers the really weird, brief conversation he’d had with Jade after Harry’d left his dorm. “Perrie, she’s... Jade’s her dream, right? But Jade already seemed to know, or something, it was weird, she wasn’t like... surprised, at all.”

Zayn slides his hands up into Niall’s hair. “What do you mean?”

“I talked to her earlier - yesterday, I guess - and all she said was that she’d started something she’d been waiting to start for a long time, whatever that means.” _It’s exciting_ , she’d said on the other end of the line, _to see a theory come together like this. It doesn’t feel anything like I thought it would. Lots of work still to do, though. I’ll see you soon!_ “It was just... weird, I dunno, she was happy but in a totally different way than I am.”

Zayn’s hands tighten in his hair. “You’re happy, even with everything that’s happening? Even though I nearly got you killed the first night we even hung out?”

“You didn’t get me _anything_ ,” Niall says, “except kind of hot and bothered. Liam almost killed me, not you.” He swallows, can feel where Liam’s nails left marks in his flesh. “What’s wrong with him, Zayn?”

“He’s what would have happened to me if you’d died,” Zayn says softly. “His Dream is gone.”

Niall blinks his eyes blearily open. “Gone, like.”

“Dead,” says Zayn. “She hung herself. Liam, he—he found her body, but he couldn’t save her.”

“God,” Niall says. “Fuck. No wonder.” He remembers his dream, the panic and pain and desperate _sorrow_ that slid over him in a rush when Zayn had turned away. He can’t think about what it would be like to see him dead, he physically can’t make his mind go there - there’s a feeling like the tingling of nerves when you get too close to a hot stove, radiating around the mental image, a void that he can’t touch because he will slip inside and be lost. He shivers and nuzzles against Zayn’s chest, tries to fill the hole with the warmth and closeness and smell of him.

“He thinks he can bring her back,” Zayn says. “That’s why he threatened you - not so you would stay dead, but so I’d have to come with him, and we’d bring both of you back.”

“How?” Niall asks. “That’s crazy, that’s like, _Jesus_ stuff.”

“I don’t know,” says Zayn. “But I know who wants him to do it, and it makes me want to run in the opposite direction.”

“Who wants him to?” Niall asks, because Zayn’s setting him up for it like the dramatic fucker he is and he’s not going to disappoint.

“Simon Cowell,” Zayn says, and his voice is full of a venom that has nothing to do with dramatic delivery and everything to do with real, cold fury.

**

“What I don’t understand,” Louis says, “is why you went to talk to Simon in the first place.”

Liam licks his lips, staring at his lap where his hands are tight, still, around Louis’ wrists. They’re sitting cross-legged on the floor of Zayn’s flat, facing each other, knee to knee. Louis’ hands are relaxed, not even trying to pull away. The sun is rising, outside the window, flooding the whole place with pale golden light. It glints off the pictures on Zayn’s wall, obscuring the faces of Zayn’s mother and sister, erasing them into nothing but bright glare. It catches in Louis’ hair, makes his eyes shine from the inside out, illuminates the line of his jaw, the curve of his cheekbone. 

Liam notices all of this, one thing at a time, slow, methodical, controlled. “I had a dream,” he says. “A new dream.”

“About Dani,” Louis says, not really asking.

Liam wants to close his eyes but he’s afraid of what would happen. “Yes,” he says instead, staring over Louis’ right shoulder, “about Dani.” He takes a breath, feels it fill his lungs, concentrates on how much air he releases with each word rather than the words themselves, can’t won’t _can’t_ think about the words themselves. “She was laughing.”

Louis swallows. Liam lets himself notice, slow, methodical, controlled, the way it moves his throat, the way the light plays over his skin. It is easier to be here than anywhere else. “So you went to Simon to find out how you could be having new dreams,” Louis says.

Liam shakes his head. “First,” he says, “I went to her grave.”

_That_ image spills in without him letting it: the green country lane, dappled in sunlight, the small cemetery on the hill. Pale pink flowers propped against the headstone, green ivy curling around the letters of her name. He takes a gasping, ragged breath, feels wetness on his cheek. Louis’ hands twitch, but he doesn’t try to pull out of Liam’s grasp. 

None of the flowers were from him, and the dirt around the ivy was new and disturbed. He remembers plunging hands into wet earth, disbelieving, horrified. “She wasn’t there,” he manages, choked. “It’s empty.”

“What?” Louis asks, shocked. “You can’t be serious.”

Liam shakes his head. “Someone took her body.” He swallows hard, feels tears slip into the corners of his mouth. “That’s when I went to Simon. I had this crazy thought - like, maybe she wasn’t dead, maybe she’d survived and just been kidnapped or. But.” He finally meets Louis’ eyes. “I cracked two of her ribs, trying to give her CPR, and I can’t. Feel her. The life of her, anywhere, I don’t feel an echo to my heartbeat o-or an answer to my breathing like I used to and I’m.” He takes a breath like laughter backwards. “I’m too broken for her to be anything but dead.”

“Li,” Louis breathes, and this time he does pull his wrists free. Liam lets him, lets him cup his face and wipe the tears from his cheeks with slow thumbs and pull him against his shoulder. He waits until he can’t feel her still chest against his palms anymore, lets himself breathe Louis in in the meantime, lets his arms settle around him. It is easier to be here than anywhere else.

“What did Simon say?” Louis asks.

Liam lets himself think about that, a little bit, just the edges of it. The edges are okay. “The Initiative took her body,” he says, and Louis twitches at that. “He says he’s found a Gifted with the power to bring people back to life, but that she’s dying, she’s. Being used up.”

Louis hands still for a moment in the middle of petting his hair. “Used up?”

“They have her—drugged, or something, they’re controlling her, forcing her to use her Gift over and over to keep themselves alive.”

“Li,” says Louis slowly, “who’s ‘they’?”

**

“Is he a supervillain?” Niall asks, mostly joking, trying to stay light and cheerful, curled as they are under the white sheets of the hospital bed.

He feels Zayn shake his head. “Life’s not so black and white as that. He’s...he taught us, me and Liam and Louis and Perrie, too. He helped us learn to save people.”

There’s a _but_ there, hanging, but it’s one that Zayn’s clearly not ready to pick up so Niall leaves it alone. “Are there supervillains?” he asks curiously. “Perrie said you guys don’t fight, like, cosmic threats, but.”

Zayn shifts so he’s pressing his nose into Niall’s hair. “Not everyone with a Gift decides to use it to help people when they could use it for personal gain instead,” he says slowly. “I think the Dreams help with that - they’re an extra conscience, almost, keeping you grounded. But. Yes, I guess there are supervillains. I’ve never really met any, though, we stay out of the big stuff.”

“Why?” asks Niall.

Zayn laughs a little. “I’m nineteen, babe. We’re young and stupid and not particularly powerful. Mostly nobody handles the real stuff until they’re in their thirties and paired and have really honed their powers. Otherwise you’re just sending a bunch of kids off to die. Some people never join the main fight. It’s a personal thing, superheroics.”

Niall laughs and curls upwards to kiss him. “Be one of those people, okay?” he says into his mouth. “Stay.”

Zayn makes a soft little sound and pulls him in further, putting a leg over Niall’s hip and drawing him in so they’re tangled fully together.

**  
“The people I’ve been fighting for the last year, since I left you and Zayn,” Liam says, and there’s a sort of calm to that, a relief in finally telling the truth. “I don’t know who they are, beyond their uniforms, but I know where they are, and I know that they’ve done.”

Louis pulls back from him to look at his face. His eyes are huge and worried and a blue Liam has never really seen anywhere else. Slow, methodical, controlled. 

“Li,” Louis breathes.

Liam feels one of the corners of his mouth pull upwards, humorless. “They killed my mum.”

It is easier to be here than anywhere else.


End file.
